“Well,” said Red, “that shows what a tenderfoot you was, and Hank, too. If you’d jist of put hair rope around your bed before you went to sleep, them snakes wouldn’t of come in.” “I had read that in stories,” said Lanky, “but I didn’t know if it were really true.” “True as the gospel,” said Red. “How does it work?” asked Lanky. “Tickles their bellies,” replied Red. “A rattlesnake jist can’t stand ticklin’. One fall when we was workin’, the cook one night didn’t make camp till dark. Then we found out he had bedded us in a regular den of reptiles. We made our beds right up techin’ each other, and put hair ropes on the ground all around the whole outfit. The next mornin’ we counted a hundred and twenty-nine rattlesnakes around the beds. They had jist naturally tickled their fool selves to death tryin’ to crawl over the rope.” “The critters, however, ain’t so numerous as they used to be in Pecos Bill’s time,” said Joe. “That man almost put ’em out of business in his day.” “How did he do that?” asked Lanky. “Bill was a very smart and ingenious lad,” said Joe. “He was the first man to capture a whiffle-poofle; he was the first man to train prairie-dogs to dig post-holes; and he was the first man to do a lot of things. Among other things he invented a way to slay rattlesnakes wholesale. When Bill wanted to capture or exterminate any sort of reptile or bird or beast, he would study the critter’s habits and find out what his weakness was; then he would go off and study and study, and purty soon he would come back with a way all figgered out. Bill always used his head. He put in two of the best years of his life studyin’ rattlesnakes. Not that Bill was afraid of ’em. But one of the critters bit his horse one time, and then he got mad. But he never let on. He jest went out and made friends with ’em and lived with ’em, and noticed their habits and their diet and where they liked to live at different times of the year, and all that. “Bill discovered that rattlesnakes had rather have moth-balls to eat than anything under the sun. A rattlesnake will leave a young and tender rabbit any day for a moth-ball. Bill found out likewise that a rattlesnake jest can’t stand chili powder. Those two clues give him an idear. First he took some chili powder and soaked it in nitroglycerin. He rolled this into little pills and coated them with moth-ball. “Then he took these balls and scattered ’em around where the reptiles stayed. Well, the critters would come out and find the moth-balls and swaller ’em right down, not thinkin’ there might be a ketch somewheres. Purty soon the outside coating would melt off, and the chili powder would burn the critters on the inside. This would make ’em mad, and they’d beat their tails against the ground and rocks, which exploded the nitroglycerin and blowed ’em into smithereens. We used to kill ’em that way here on the ranch, but the boss made us quit after one of the critters crawled under a steer and blowed him into atoms.”