This caution was habitual with him and was the child of experience. Experience had taught him some bitter lessons and had given him his name. For, in the spring of the year when he reached his full height and was filled with conceit of his strength, a famine threatened. The wolf ranged far and got nothing. Hitherto suspicious of the haunts of men, he overcame his fears at last and raided the ranch headquarters and came away with a lusty young rooster. Next night he attempted to repeat this feat, and while nosing the skeleton of a cow lying close to the home pasture fence, something snapped over his foot. A numbing pain shot through him. When he bounded high and backward to clear, he was jerked to the ground. Clasped like a vise about his toes was a steel trap, a mercilessly powerful contraption of chains, weighted with two hundred pounds. It had him, but fortunately his leg was not caught. In his frenzy of terror, freedom was worth any sacrifice or pain. He sank his teeth into his own flesh and gnawed his toes off, and holding the bleeding stump up in front of him, fled on three legs. Not a sound did he make during his agony. It was not pluck, but a stoicism begot of fear. Had he whined, a charge of buckshot would have ended his days; for the cook dozed fitfully behind a woodpile fifty yards away. When the foot grew well he was a trifle short in the left foreleg; but it made scarcely any difference in his gait. The only difference was in the trail he made, and from that he was known as Scartoe. The hurt the cow gave him healed with astonishing rapidity, for sunlight and dry air are Nature’s magicians. While taking a siesta in front of his den next afternoon and tenderly licking the ragged wound, he was witness of a strange encounter. His pups were frisking about, tumbling and growling and snapping in youthful enjoyment of life, while the mother lay beside him, encouraging these evidences of prospective adult ferocity. At the foot of the knoll whereon they reposed, something rose, wavering, with a fear-thrilling rattle, and the pups scattered. At the same moment a sharp hiss answered this first challenge. With eyes glowing and ears cocked, husband and wife waited for the battle between these enemies. A dark green reptile with cream-colored bands, about forty inches in length, was circling a rattler. The latter lay coiled, ready to strike, his folds curling and uncurling in long ripples as his head turned to follow the movements of his enemy. Fully six feet in length he was and of a prodigious thickness; but fear had already entered the heart of him. The king-snake sped around him with the speed of light; once, twice, thrice the rattler launched a blow, but there was no foe there. Then the malignant killer was on him.