However, nothing untoward happened. Had my luck been running true to form, there should have been at least one rattlesnake coiled on the margin of the shallow ditch into which I squeezed myself, and waited in misery for the day herder to return. As I lay in the ditch I just had to recall the time, a short while before, when a rattlesnake, coiled by a cowpath, struck as I trotted past—barefoot, of course—and got his fangs hooked in my trouser leg, requiring two wild jumps to dislodge his snakeship. The herd was owned by Than Morris and Abe Williams, the latter a brother of Mrs. Jake Wolfley. Morris and Wolfley were brothers-in-law. John Taylor, herder, was a son of Hebe Taylor, of Atchison. John Taylor was later bailiff of the Nemaha county court, in Seneca. And he was the father of Earl W. Taylor for whom the Seneca American Legion Post was named. Hebe Taylor also, at one time, ran cattle in the open country southwest of Wetmore — with Ed. Keggin. Charley went straight to the Morris general store in Wetmore and told Than of my predicament, and Morris immediately rounded up two cowpunchers. John Taylor, working with a herd to the southwest, chanced to be in town, and rode out with Abe Williams. The herd had grazed on past my tree-perch. The unruly steer did not follow, but if the critter was capable of the sound thinking I was willing to credit him with, “I betcha” he always wished he had. A good cowhand could play a tune with a cattlewhip on a critter’s rump, under dead run. And John Taylor was good. He lashed his short-handled 10-foot whip overhead to the steer’s rump, right and left, with rhythmic timing, making the hair fly with each crack. The steer’s hindparts, seemingly trying to outrun his foreparts, swung to the right and swung to the left with clocklike regularity—and he thus wove himself deep into the herd, bawling “bloody murder.” When told of John Taylor’s adroitness with the whip, my father said, “I wouldn’t care to tan his hide”—meaning the steer’s, of course. While father bought the hides from the lost dead of all those big herds—sometimes the losses in the early spring were heavy—he tanned only a few of them. He didn’t like to tan a mutilated hide, nor the hide of a branded critter—and he wouldn’t tan a grubby murrain hide.