Cautiously we went back to
the snake; he was still groping with his tail, turning up his ugly belly in
the light. A faint, fetid smell came from him, and a thread of green
liquid oozed from his crushed head.
`Look, Tony, that's his poison,' I said.
I took a long piece of string from my pocket, and she lifted his head with
the spade while I tied a noose around it. We pulled him out straight and
measured him by my riding-quirt; he was about five and a half feet long.
He had twelve rattles, but they were broken off before they began to taper,
so I insisted that he must once have had twenty-four. I explained to
Antonia how this meant that he was twenty-four years old, that he must have
been there when white men first came, left on from buffalo and Indian
times. As I turned him over, I began to feel proud of him, to have a kind
of respect for his age and size. He seemed like the ancient, eldest Evil.
Certainly his kind have left horrible unconscious memories in all
warm-blooded life. When we dragged him down into the draw, Dude sprang off
to the end of his tether and shivered all over--wouldn't let us come near
him.
We decided that Antonia should ride Dude home, and I would walk. As she
rode along slowly, her bare legs swinging against the pony's sides, she
kept shouting back to me about how astonished everybody would be.
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