e was sitting on the
edge of the cattle-pond, having a quiet pipe before supper. Antonia
called him to come quick and look. He did not say anything for a minute,
but scratched his head and turned the snake over with his boot.

'Where did you run onto that beauty, Jim?'

'Up at the dog-town,' I answered laconically.

'Kill him yourself? How come you to have a weepon?'

'We'd been up to Russian Peter's, to borrow a spade for Ambrosch.'

Otto shook the ashes out of his pipe and squatted down to count the
rattles. 'It was just luck you had a tool,' he said cautiously. 'Gosh! I
wouldn't want to do any business with that fellow myself, unless I had
a fence-post along. Your grandmother's snake-cane wouldn't more than
tickle him. He could stand right up and talk to you, he could. Did he
fight hard?'

Antonia broke in: 'He fight something awful! He is all over Jimmy's
boots. I scream for him to run, but he just hit and hit that snake like
he was crazy.'

Otto winked at me. After Antonia rode on he said: 'Got him in the head
first crack, didn't you? That was just as well.'

We hung him up to the windmill, and when I went down to the kitchen,
I found Antonia standing in the middle of the floor, telling the story
with a great deal of colour.

Subsequent experiences with rattlesnakes taught me that my first
encounter was fortunate in circumstance. My big rattler was old, and had
led too easy a life; there was not much fight in him. He had probably
lived there for years, with a fat prairie-dog for breakfast whenever he
felt like it, a sheltered home, even an owl-feather bed, perhaps, and he
had forgot that the world doesn't owe rattlers a living. A snake of his
size, in fighting trim, would be more than any boy could handle. So in
reality it was a mock adventure; the game was fixed for me by chance, as
it probably was for many a dragon-slayer. I had been adequately armed by
Russian Peter; the snake was old and lazy; and I had Antonia beside me,
to appreciate and admire.

That snake hung on our corral fence for several days; some of the
neighbours came to see it and agreed that it was the biggest rattler
ever killed in those parts. This was enough for Antonia. She liked me
better from that time on, and she never took a supercilious air with me
again. I had killed a big snake--I was now a big fellow.

VIII

WHILE THE AUTUMN COLOUR was growing pale on the grass and cornfields,
things went badly with our friends the