Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 June 1887 — AMONG THE RATTLESNAKES. [ARTICLE]

AMONG THE RATTLESNAKES.

Hair-Raining Stories of Adventures with Deadly Serpents. , A lady gave some reminiscences of Arkansas inthe presence of a Cincinnati JUftquirer reporter, and as there were several army people about the talk became interesting on this head. She said: . - ' “I was in the army about seventeen years, moved from post t<? pillar, and yet on the whole I look back at it with pleasure. We were children of nature, dependent on our husbands, and our husbands were brave men doing their duty. “I have stood beside my husband in new quarters, which he hod just comb to occupy for the year, and have seen him stand on the little porch and shoot five great rattlesnake at a salute.” “Oh, rattlesnaks,” said another; don’t talk about them. When I had my little baby in Texas and was not strong enough to get oiit of bed, I beard something moving around the floor of our hut, and I put my hand out and it touched a rattlesnake. He retreated under the bed, and the way that thing rattled rings in my ears yet. It was no slight, unconscious, nervous rattle, but the loud watchman’s alarm of the reptile, which showed that he was mad. There I had to lie and feel that thing under the bed. You can suppose that my hair began to stand on end. My husband came in and I told him to kill the snake. He jabbed under the bed with his sword in its scabbard and the snake ran out, and before we could get at it it had run down a hole in the hollow side of the hut. He got his saber and put it in there and cut the snake to pieces as it lay in the bottom of the hole.” j “Ah,” said an officer present, “the snakes of Texas beat any snakes in the world I suppose. You see rattlesnakes on the Eastern mountains and on the Ozarks, but the rattlesnakes of Texas are the most enormous villains one can see. The very sight of them seems to stupefy. I recollect one day when I had ridden from early dawn to sundown, and was sore in every bone, and the heat was like a furnace, I came to a place where I went into bivouac, and, taking my “saddle off from the horse, put it down on the ground and stretched myself out with njy head upon it tc sleep. Suddenly I heard a large noise, and my sergeant ran to me crying: ‘Lieutenant, get up at once, get up.' A‘s I sprang to my feet I saw a huge rattlesnake within a foot of my head coiled and ready to strike. When we killed the snake we found that I had put my saddle right over the hole which was his home, and he had crawled over to come in and go to bed for the night, and finding me there naturally looked upon me as an intruder.” “Ah,” said a lady present, “the best time to see rattlesnakes is when you sit down to dine in new quarters which have been abandoned for awhile, and Took up at the ceiling and find a couple of them, warmed by the fire which you have made, ready to descend into the middle of the table. You, of course, spring to you feet And the ladies scream, while their husbands have to improve tbeir appetites by killing the snakes as the first course for dinner.”