My wife had put pickled cling peaches on the table. Now, everyone knows how hard it is to get the meat off a pickled cling peach. I shoved one into my mouth and was doing the best I could with it when Myrtle, looking across the table, said with shocked overtone, “Did you put that whole peach in your mouth?” She of course had not seen August put one in his mouth—but, no matter, August shot his out onto his plate right now. TEXAS CATTLE AND RATTLESNAKES Not Hitherto Published—1947. By John T. Bristow When harvesting sumac, often barefooted and always barehanded, we boys, sons of the tanner, had to keep a sharp lookout for rattlesnakes—and Texas cattle. We were repeatedly so warned by our parents. Also, it was generally understood that all children should “watchout” for Indians. This, however, did not greatly disturb us after we had made friends with Eagle Eye. Then, one day, while cutting sumac for the tannery, with my brother Charley, near a timbered ravine three miles out southeast, close to the Oliver Logue farm, a long-horn steer, out of a large herd, chased me up a tree early in the afternoon and held me prisoner in the treetop until the riders, Abe Williams and John Taylor, came to round up the herd for the night. I thought that steer would surely butt his horns off, the way he rammed that six-inch tree. He would back off, paw the ground, shake his slobbering head, and come snorting at the tree again and again. After quieting down, he grazed fitfully and frightfully close to the tree—and he came trotting in several times with something ugly on his bovine mind, I’m sure. Even now I wonder is it possible for an enraged cowbrute to have red eyes. The day herder, at ease, on a ridge a quarter mile to the west—probably reading a Frank Merriwell baseball story—was letting the herd feed north, and so long as the cattle did not attempt to go over the rise to the east, out of sight, Wes Shuemaker would have no occasion to ride down my way. And it would have been futile for me to have tried to call him, with a south wind blowing forty-fifty mph. My brother was safely on the other side of the ravine close to trees, but he slipped out the back way and went home. I knew he was doing the right thing. And I knew too that I would remain in the tree until the arrival of the riders. Those Texas cattle behaved nicely for mounted men, but they could not abide a person on foot. I really had no business on that side of the ravine, with those cattle feeding there—but I guess I was, as always, a little too venturesome. I knew that herd had some bad actors in it. In fact, I had been warned to never get off my horse when riding as relief herder of that same herd, on several occasions. And one time while all alone at the dinner hour my mount, in jumping a ditch, broke the saddle girth and spilled me on a rattlesnake infested prairie, amongst those longhorns—with not a tree in sight.