We was camping in the Winding Stairs, not too far from Talihina in what was left of the Indian Territory, me, Bob Rennick, who shot Two-Gun Raynor out in El Paso, and little Davey Rudabaugh, who everyone called Rutabaga, only not to his not face … not twice. Rutabaga had got us into a scrape down in Chihuahua: there was a card game, someone was cheating, someone said it was Davey, Davey shot him. Since we was jointly and severally wanted in Texas—we might have borrowed a horse or two or the like—it seemed like a good idea to keep heading north and disappear a while into the Territory.
The Territory held a lot of rough country and a lot of rough customers. Created so Old Hickory could kick the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminoles out of the USofA, soon after the War of Rebellion, the government concluded it could contract the Territory while cramming in other tribes, leaving a heap more land for white folks and a heap less Indians in general. They packed in Kiowas and Commanches, Cheyennes and Arapahos, Osages, Apaches, Pawnees and Kansas, Senecas, Shawnees and Quapaws and even some Modocs from out in California. Then they added Miamis and Wyandotes, Sacs and Foxes, Kikapoos, Iowas, Pottawatomies, Wichitas, Caddos and Delawares and the last half dozen Texas Tonkas anyone could still find. No two tribes could speak the lingo of any third; it made for a high old time, you bet. Throw in the bad actors like Raynor and Rudabaugh—and me if I’m being honest—well, the Territory wasn’t anywhere you’d want to be if you could be anywhere else.
It was just after sunset, which come early in the mountains, and from the carcass of a lightening-shattered white oak, we had struck up a fire, more for company’s sake than any other. We seen a rider coming up the trail, but he seen us too and helloed the fire before we could make him out real good, so we waved him in and kept our hands near to our belts. He weren’t anybody I knowed—a long, skinny feller on an oversize gray horse, must have stood sixteen, seventeen hands—but Bob and Davey knowed him well enough. He was wearing a U.S. Marshal’s tin, which seemed a little precarious considering where we’d been and what we’d been doing, but Rutabaga told him to set, share some bacon and beans. The Marshal had some coffee, which we was sorely lacking, and since him and me was the only strangers at this fandango, he shook my hand and introduced himself as Henry Finn. He was out of Ft. Smith, Arkansas, so that was alright: he shouldn’t have no call to be interested in Texas business, not that any was ever brought up.
For a while the conversation was almighty thin, which was a regular feature of social life in the Territory. When the other fellow might have helped hang your best friend the month before, on account of your best friend shot his best friend the month before that, there wasn’t much could be safely talked of but the weather and digestive upsets. When those had been pretty thoroughly exhausted, we did finally get down to some serious yarning. We was talking about snakes.
“Your copperhead is vicious, that I’ll allow,” Bob Rennick says, “and you don’t want to let your baby sister too close to a Louisiana cottonmouth. The eastern rattler’s bite is a whole lot worse than his bark, but not one of them could hold a candle to a little old Texas diamondback.
“Nobody ever said Texas wanted for rattlesnakes, but did you know that every she-snake hatches out six thousand pups in a year? The only reason the whole state ain’t paved in rattlers—though Austin has got more than its share—is because they are so mean, not one in a hundred makes it out of snake-babyhood. There’s days you could ride across the llanos and come upon a dead rattlesnake every hundred yards or so: that’s right, not one of them dares get closer to the next than a hundred yards. But, them rattlers is so mean, for lack of any better, they just bite theirselves to death. Some say it one way and some the other. There’s them who say Texas rattlesnakes are so natural blood mean, they haven’t no choice: they just do it out of a kind of habit. Others will tell you they do it for sheer spite, or just to show off.
“Well, there was one old rattlesnake so long-lived and so mean that the Commanch called him Kwasina-bo Tuyatu-ki, which freely come out as ‘Mean old snake, just don’t know when enough is enough.’ More than a dozen braves gone out after him—and if there’s anything meaner in Texas than a rattler, it’s a Commanch—and not one come back to tell the tale. Finally they gone after him with a whole thundering war party.
“Kwasina-bo Tuyatu-ki stood off them Indians for three solid days, just a-humping and a-rattling and a-spitting out poison. Three of them warriors died and one went stone blind. (Run into him up around Ft Bend, and danged if he could see worth a damn.) That snake killed fourteen ponies, two dogs and a Gila monster just strayed into the fracas, minding his own business, not doing anybody the least bit of harm. After Kwasina-bo Tuyatu-ki run out of poison, he commenced to calling them Indians hard names and ended up insulting their mothers, so they just layed back a ways and spiked that mean old snake with so many arrows, he looked like a field of alfalfa just before harvest come around.
“You was a brave enemy Kwasina-bo Tuyatu-ki,” the head man declares—for them Indians will talk to anything—“and we will treat you like one.” Then he pulls out his scalping knife and walks up to the critter, preparing to take a slice of hair, or skin, or scale, or whatever, which was the Commanche way to make sure that mean old snake couldn’t return from the spirit world to bother them no more and to bring honor to the warrior who done it.”
Rennick paused to take us in.
“Well, be damned if, when the chief come up on that snake, he didn’t discover that old rattler had shaved himself bald, denying them his scalp (or scales, or whatever). Now, if you knowed anything about Commanch, you would have knowed that was the meanest thing you could do to them. Even dead that rattler was meaner than eighty-seven living snakes of any other breed.”
Then little Davey pipes up.
“Well, I heard of that Kwasina-bo Tuyatu-ki, and I reckon he was truly mean, but he wasn’t half as mean as this other rattler I heard tell of, though I never did catch his name, if he had one. This other snake, one day he bit a passing cowboy, name of Marvis Dolittle Jones. (Not them Jones, nor them other Joneses neither.) Through some oversight most likely, Marvis Jones, he kind of neglected to die—he was a neglectful man. Took him eight years, six months and twenty-three days to recover, but he got over that snakebite just fine.
“Now, when word come back to that rattlesnake that Marvis Jones was still answering to the dinner bell, he swore up, down, north and south to catch him up and finish him off. For nine years, that snake trailed that cowboy from one end of Texas to the other, up into Kansas, back to Texas again, out the Chisom Trail to New Mexico and one summer even as far as Cheyenne.
“That snake was determined, wouldn’t let nothing stand in his way. Once, when he thought he had a-caught sight of Jones, he chawed his way through a herd of longhorns to get at him, only, when he clears his way through the litter of bodies, wasn’t no one there but an old biscuit-shooter. Well, he bit hell out of the cookie, then just for spite, bit hell out of the chuck wagon too. Not a body could eat a bit of grub off that cook-cart for a full ten years without breaking out in pustulations and a flaming fever so hot, you could light the campfire with it. Wherever they parked that wagon, it like to poison an acre, acre and a half of grass, and one time when they drove it across the Red River, it killed all the fish from Colbert clear to Texarkana.
“When it begun to look like that snake wouldn’t catch that cowboy any too soon, it began to hunt down every single member of Marvis Dolittle Jones’ family one by one. It killed his Ma and it killed his Pa. It killed his three growed sisters and their husbands, and it killed his baby brother. It went out of its way to hunt down aunts, uncles and cousins and once, out of plain dad-gummed meanness, it went even further out of its way to kill a third cousin by marriage twice removed. (Nobody ain’t that mean, not even a carpetbagger, not even a scalawag.) I tell you boys, that snake killed Marvis Jones’ favorite dog and then it killed Marvis Jones’ favorite chicken.
“It had to happen and it did. One day Marvis and that snake come to meet up in Tombstone, Arizona.
“‘Draw you yeller-livered bastard,’ the snake calls out, ‘for I mean to put you on Boot Hill.’
“Now, though Jones knowed he hadn’t not a prayer in this world, he drawed thinking, ‘There’s worse places to end up than Boot Hill.’
“Well, that snake he leapt up forty-two foot straight into the air, come down on top of that old cowboy and drove him halfway into the ground, a-biting and a-chawing the whole time and Jones, he never even got off a single shot. Then the snake pulled off Jones’ boots and drug them away into some bushes, so when the burying party come on Jones’ body, naturally they couldn’t plant him on Boot Hill. Instead, they had to take him to the other side of town where they had a little cemetery for the women and the children.
“Now,” Rutabaga finished up, “if that ain’t the meanest thing a snake ever done, you tell me what was.”
I was clearly amongst a class of liars head and shoulders above my own. I meant to keep shut up anyways, but then the Marshal put in.
“You was talking about Tombstone, and a right pretty place it is, though I never been there myself. But I heard tell that out in Arizona, they got their own kind of rattlesnakes, not as big as your Texas ones, true, but pound for pound twice or four times as mean. Them Arizona rattlers, so they say, take especial pleasure in cutting down a bride on her wedding day and you ain’t nobody among them snakes until you have bit a baby through its christening clothes, and not just one baby neither.
“Them snakes are so mean, they say, they will not even trifle to bite someone ain’t naturally from Arizona, nor most Indians, but they will bite an Apache or a Yaqui from time to time, if he is full in the prime of life. One of them snakes, he bit a mule once. Mule didn’t die right off, but he went around for the rest of his life the sweetest, most even-tempered beast till the day twenty years later he finally keeled over from that snake-bite. Now, that is some mean snake, can gentle down a mule and kill him just the same.
“Them Arizona snakes, people say, was mighty fond of playing poker, which they learned from a Tucson dealer who they allowed was nearly as mean as a rattlesnake himself. Being mean and crooked sidewinders, they played kind of backwards, though. That is, if they knowed you wasn’t cheating, your life would not be worth a damn among them.
“One day, five, six of them snakes was playing draw poker, every card marked in six or seven ways. One was using a quartz pebble for a shiner and another two had aces up their sleeves. Two others—it was hot and maybe they was feeling some kind of lazy—wasn’t doing no worse than pawing through the discards and one dude of a snake didn’t appear to be up to no mischief at all, yet he kept raking in one pot after another.
“If one of them other snakes had a full house, aces over, he was holding four threes. If someone filled an inside straight, he had the full boat. If he didn’t have no more than a pair of fours, he would win with those. Them other snakes was like to bust a gut.
“Surely you know a snake don’t take any kinder to steady loosing than a man, especially not to some four-flushing stranger, and finally, one of them snakes couldn’t help but speak up.
“‘Friend,’ he says, from which you know you ain’t, ‘you been taking our money for nine hours now and ain’t lost a single hand. What’s worst, if you are cheating, none of us can’t figure it out no how. We think you ain’t and we don’t take kindly to your type around these parts, if you take my meaning.’ Then he rolls his eyes and skins back his fangs and the others does likewise.
“‘Cheat you greenhorns!?!’ that mean old snake hollers out. ‘Don’t make me laugh. You are the sorriest bunch of poker players I ever did meet. Why, I just as soon propose marriage to a horny toad as ever play with you fellers again.’
“‘Cheat!?!’ he howls again. “Here, go on, take your money back.’ Then he gets up on his horse and rides off pretty as you please.
“Now, boys, ain’t that the meanest thing a snake has ever done?”
But I guess they didn’t think so and Raynor and Rudabaugh commenced to hooting and beating on him with their hats and whatever else was to hand.
“Huck Finn, you son of a bitch, you are the meanest snake between the Mississippi and the Colorado,” Rutabaga sings out, then they all fall to whooping and laughing and pounding on each other.
In the morning, when we woke, the Marshal was gone.
The author is a retired anthropologist, a would-be bird scientist, and a freshly self-discovered painter working on miniatures in acrylic. The submission is excerpted from a novel he has been working at for at least forty years, whose narrator began life in 1840 in Buffalo, NY and looks about to end it on a gallows in Buffalo, WY in 1897.