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More "Rattlesnake" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Snake Bull's, Indian name is Ear-Ous-Sah-Chee-dups, which means male snake. Years ago when far from camp he was bitten by a rattlesnake. The only companion with him did all within his power to save his friend. The death stupor was coming on, and his companion hurried to the camp with the tidings. His relations rushed to the rescue. He finally recovered and has ever since been called ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... like everything to do its office, whether it be a milch-cow or a rattlesnake," he assumed, perhaps somewhat too hastily in the latter case, that all the world understands the functions which a milch-cow or a rattlesnake is called upon to perform. No one can doubt that the office of a translator is to translate, but a wide difference of opinion may exist, and, in fact, ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... mercy of the sun, and is high or low, according as that rises or sets in the heavens. At Martinique, where at noonday it darts its devouring rays perpendicularly upon the cane-fields, and every one flies into the shade to escape its scorching heat, the rattlesnake traverses the country, monarch of all he surveys; he strikes rapidly with a vigorous tail upon the calcined ground; and woe then to any one who receives his bite! All the fire of the atmosphere has passed into his frame. Now ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... the table, his face a map of appalling fury and hate. "Let him go to it, then. I've been a cripple seventeen years because Beaudry shot me up. By God! I'll gun his son inside of twenty-four hours. I'll stomp him off'n the map like he was a rattlesnake." ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... leave your homes and seek its destruction. I would not here inquire minutely into its history. It is said to have originated in Arabia, the country of the false prophet. The aborigines of our forests never knew it. They could proudly tread on the rattlesnake and copperhead, but never fell before the worm of the still. O woful day when it found its way to our coasts; when here ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... creature is so absolutely graceful as a rattlesnake, and none more gentle in intention. It is only against imposition that he protests. Our forefathers had learned a not unworthy lesson from their contact with nature in the New World when they put upon the first flag of the colonies a rattlesnake, with the Latin legend, Nemo ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... long and deliberate journey, (he says,) one would suppose, might have introduced his party to an intimate acquaintance with some of these pests of America. It is true that they killed several of the serpent tribe; black snakes, garter-snakes, &c. and that they saw one rattlesnake of extraordinary size. They experienced inconvenience from musquitoes in a few damp spots, just as they would have done from gnats in England. In their late expeditions in the Illinois, where they led the lives of thorough backwoods-men, if they were so unfortunate as to pitch their ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... pole under it and slung it ashore. "There! how do you like that?" said he, and he headed the boat upstream again. It was a "copper-bellied moccasin," he declared, whatever that may be, and was worse than a rattlesnake. ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... Zamuro, or Galinazo: the Brazilian vulture of Buffon. I cannot reconcile myself to the adoption of names, which designate, as belonging to a single country, animals common to a whole continent.) the crocodile, the viper, and the rattlesnake. The gaseous emanations, which are the vehicles of this aroma, seem to be evolved in proportion only as the mould, containing the spoils of an innumerable quantity of reptiles, worms, and insects, begins to be impregnated with water. I have seen ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... staggered in their belief of it. "These men do certainly play strange tricks and very dexterously." The same writer also observes, "One of the negroes whom I had hired with the plantation of Jaguaribi, had one leg much thicker than the other. This was occasioned, as he told me, by the bite of a rattlesnake; he said he had been cured from the bites of snakes by a certain curador de cobra, or Mandingueiro, and had therefore not died; but that as the 'moon was strong,' he had not escaped receiving some injury from ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... of the villain Love.' Such love as it was—the love of the privileged butcher for the lamb. The burden of the letters, put in epigram, was rattlesnake and bird. A narrative of Anastasia's sister, Elizabeth, signed and sealed, with names of witnesses appended, related in brief bald English the history of the events which had killed her. It warmed pathetically when dwelling on the writer's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a rattlesnake, nor a shark. These creatures only fulfil their natures. The shark who devours a baby is no more sinful than the lady who eats a shrimp. We do not blame the maniac who burns a house down and brains a policeman, nor the mad dog who bites a minor poet. But, none the less, ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... snakes used in this dance are treated from first to last with the utmost kindness and respect, especially the rattlesnakes, a dozen of which will frequently be squirming on the ground at once. It is noticeable that the Indians never pick up a rattlesnake when coiled, but always wait until it straightens itself out under the feather stroking, for it is claimed that the rattlesnake cannot strike uncoiled. At all events, when one is at its full length, the Indians ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... nearer Joan, as if intent on his own pack, began to whisper, hoarsely: "That's Jack Kells, the California road-agent. He's a gun fighter—a hell-bent rattlesnake. When I saw him last he had a rope round his neck an' was bein' led away to be hanged. I heerd afterward he was rescued by pals. Joan, if the idee comes into his head he'll kill me. I don't know what to do. For God's sake think of somethin'!... Use your ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... he saw a Rattlesnake That questioned him in Greek: He looked again, and found it was The Middle of Next Week. "The one thing I regret," he said, "Is ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... Marlin at Oakdale instantly," he rapped out. "Ranger Morton bitten rattlesnake. Send motor-car where battery was delivered this morning. May need man help ranger. Bring doctor. Tell wife get ready. Will listen ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... getting purple in the face under the impression of a contradiction. "That's what I said—Metsican. Used to call him Black Peter. I've seen him eat rattlesnake. Swallow him clean down. Like this, he would—Gollop!" Here Mr. Wells goes off into a quiet chuckle of scepticism, one finger crooked over his pipe-stem, his sightless eyes blinking at the coals. "Great big bull ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... tempter—the original Jacobs—was called in Hebrew a nachash, so I'm told. But folks don't seem to understand exactly what this nachash was. Some say it was a rattlesnake, some a straddle-bug. Old Dr. Adam Clarke, I've heard, vowed it was a monkey. They're all out of their reckoning. It's as plain as a pikestaff that it was nothing but Fried Fat cooked up to order, and it's been a-tempting weak sisters ever ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... origin, never had the most brilliant nor the most painstaking effort been able to connect with the slayers nor their instigator. He worked in the dark by hidden hands; but the death from the hands was as certain as the rattlesnake's. Certain of his victims, by luck or cleverness, seemed to have escaped sometimes as many as three or four attempts but in the end the old man's Killers ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... drawn to the rattlesnake's power, As the smoker's eye fills at the opium hour, As a horse reaches up to the manger above, As the waiting ear yearns for the whisper of love, From the arms of the Bride, iron-visaged and slow, The Captain bent down to the Head ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... said, addressing Mrs. White, "Jimmy and me thought anything about a rattlesnake would do for a temperance piece, and if you had only let Jimmy go on you would have seen what happened even a snake that et what he hadn't ought to, and please ma'am, Jimmy and me thought it might be a good lesson ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... ter fool with ye now, old rattlesnake," she called back, as she went. "Ef I wasn't in sech a hurry, I'd shore bust ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... shot, not distant, startled them. He crouched, wary as a rattlesnake about to strike. The rifle seemed almost ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... "It was not a rattlesnake, nor was it any kind of a snake such as are usually found in this part of our country, of ...
— The Rover Boys on the Farm - or Last Days at Putnam Hall • Arthur M. Winfield (AKA Edward Stratemeyer)
... are remarkably skilled in curing the bite of venomous serpents, and have found a medicine peculiarly adapted to the bite of each species. For example, the leaf of the Rattlesnake-root (Polygala senega) is the most efficacious remedy against the bite of this dreadful animal. God has mercifully granted it to grow in the greatest plenty in all parts most infested by the rattlesnake. It is very remarkable that this herb acquires its greatest perfection just at the time ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... change had come to you, a change definite and enduring, which left your inner processes forever different from what they had been, you turned sharp to the west and rode five miles along the knife-edge Ridge Trail to where Rattlesnake Canon led you down and back ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... green hunting-shirts and carrying knives and tomahawks. "Liberty or Death," Patrick Henry's stirring words, were on their breasts, and over their heads floated a significant banner. On it was a coiled rattlesnake, with the warning motto, "Don't tread ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... of the same date, 1775. It was a yellow flag with the representation of a rattlesnake coiled, ready to strike, in green, and the motto below it: 'Don't ...
— The Boy Scouts Patrol • Ralph Victor
... the household melodies be sung, The pleasant pictures on the wall be hung— So let us hold against the hosts of night And slavery all our vantage-ground of light. Let Treason boast its savagery, and shake From its flag-folds its symbol rattlesnake, Nurse its fine arts, lay human skins in tan, And carve its pipe-bowls from the bones of man, And make the tale of Fijian banquets dull By drinking whiskey from a loyal skull,— But let us guard, till this sad war shall cease, (God grant it soon!) the graceful arts of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... tried to enter, I found it so given over to poison-oak and rattlesnakes that I did not care to pursue my investigations very far. I did not know at that time that I was quite immune from the poison of the oak and that the California rattlesnake was quite so friendly and harmless an animal as John Muir has since assured us that he is. The last time that I passed Silverado, it was accessible only by the aid ...
— The Sea Fogs • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Sassafras Myrtle Wax Tree. Vinegar Tree Poplar ("Cotton Tree") Black Oak Linden or Bass Tree Box Elder or Stink-wood Tree Cassine or Yapon. Tooth-ache Tree or Prickly Ash Passion Thorn or Honey Locust. Bearded Creeper Palmetto Bramble, Sarsaparilla Rattlesnake Herb Red Dye Plant. Flat Root Panther ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... in connection with his printing office, where he sold a strange variety of goods: legal blanks, ink, pens, paper, books, maps, pictures, chocolate, coffee, cheese, codfish, soap, linseed oil, broadcloth, Godfrey's cordial, tea, spectacles, rattlesnake root, lottery tickets, and stoves—to mention only a few of the many articles he advertised. Deborah Read, who became his wife in 1730, looked after his house, tended shop, folded and stitched pamphlets, bought rags, ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... Cystoptiris or Bladder Fern, with at least three kinds of moss complete the list of "Flowerless Plants." Three little clumps of Violets are sending out new leaves. There are a few leaves of Partridge-berry vine, a yellow Oxalis, an Orchid called Rattlesnake-Plantain, having lovely velvety leaves veined with white, a few sprigs of Mouse-ear Chickweed, and, last of all, a leaf of a Jack-in-the-Pulpit plant, the corm of which was doubtless hidden among the roots of the Ferns. So, while the cold ...
— The Mayflower, January, 1905 • Various
... and welcome, if that is the best thing for society; hate him, in a certain sense, as you hate a rattlesnake, but, if you pretend to be a philosopher, recognize the fact that what you hate in him is chiefly misfortune, and that if you had been born with his villanous low forehead and poisoned instincts, and bred among ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... news came through the telephone that Bailloud's Brigade had been driven in by a big Turkish counter-attack, with a loss of 400 men and some first class officers. Most of us showed signs, I will not say of being rattled, but of having stumbled against a rattlesnake. Gouraud remained unaffectedly in possession of himself as host of a lunch party. He said, "We will not take the trenches by not taking the coffee. Let us drink it first, and then we will consider." So we drank our coffee; lit our smokes, and afterwards Gouraud, through Girodon, issued ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... bush-master (cona-couchi) unrivalled for its brilliant colours, and the deadly nature of its poison; and the labari equally poisonous, which erects its scales in a frightful manner when irritated. The rattlesnake was also to be met with, and harmless tree snakes of many species. Under the river's bank lay enormous caymen or alligators,—one lately killed measured twenty-two feet. Wild deer and the peccari hog were seen in the glades in the centre of the island; and the jaguar ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... shrouding myself as well as I was able, was soon overpowered by sleep. I did not awake till the sun had gained the meridian, and, creeping from my retreat, beheld, with some degree of terror, an enormous rattlesnake that was coiled up full in my way, and seemed determined to oppose my passage. This animal is frequent in the southern colonies, and is the most poisonous of all the reptiles that haunt the woods. He is in length from two to six feet, beautifully variegated with different ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... A thick-bodied rattlesnake crawled slowly and clumsily out from the shelter of a little ledge, his fearful eyes gleaming with deadly intentions against a ground-squirrel frisking upon the end of a mossy log, near where Captain Bob Bennett was seated, poring over a troublesome detail in the ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... name. The Pilot Black Snake or Mountain Black Snake is often taken for the Common Black Snake. Its head is larger and it is spotted with white. It is a snake frequently found in the same locations as the rattlesnake and copperhead. The Chicken Snake is fond of eggs and young chickens. Like the Fox Snake it will emit ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... as he finished the test he was making at the moment—"without a doubt it is crotalin, the venom of the rattlesnake, Crotalus horridus." ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... the party, says: "It is understood that the Seris are cannibals—at all events they eat every white man they can slay. They are cruel and treacherous beyond description. Toward the white man, their attitude is exactly the same as that of a white man toward a rattlesnake—they kill him as a matter of course, unless restrained by fear. Never do they fight in open warfare, but always lie in ambush. They are copper-colored Ishmaelites. It is their custom to murder everybody, white, ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... had seen playing coldly but triumphantly about his lips in her dreams. That smile was the feather to the arrow that pierced her, and that was piercing her at that moment—it was the cold but glittering glance of the rattlesnake, when breaking down by the poison of his eyes the power of ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... upon a rattlesnake." finished Tom. "Better keep your eyes open, Songbird, or the rattlers will be after you. They love music and poetry, ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... good old days of the Jones and Plummer trail there were no wire fences, and the sullen farmer had not yet arrived. Your cowboy at that time was a person of thrill and consequence. He wore a broad-brimmed Stetson hat, and all about it a rattlesnake skin by way of band, retaining head and rattles. This was to be potent against headaches—a malady, by the way, which swept down no cowboy save in hours emergent of a spree. In such case the snake cure didn't cure. The hat was retained ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... is a granite ridge, some two hundred feet in length, irregular in formation and height, resembling a huge molehill, extending down from the Rocky Mountain heights and being across the river's course; the "Gate" being a vertical section, the width of the stream, cut out of a spur of Rattlesnake Mountain. If his Satanic majesty, whose name it bears, had charge of the construction, apparently he intended it only as a passage-way for the river, the cut being the exact width of the river as it flows through. The greater ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... about him, trying to make something of his strange experiences, when his eye was caught by a glitter and a gleam in the grass, which caused him to spring affrightedly backward, as from the glittering eye and gleaming crest of a rattlesnake. But no serpent was there. The more the pity! Only the red moccasins, adjusted side by side, with their old air of easy self-assurance, and now in open view before him. Yet, but the moment previous his look had chanced to be resting on that very spot, and naught but the tufted ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... into a deep ravine that leads here where I am. You'll be out of sight all the way up once you hit the ravine. I'd—I'd worm along pretty spry if I was you, going down as far as the scrub oak—say, about as swift as a rattlesnake strikes—and pray any little prayers you happen to remember. And say, Pringle, before you go ... I'm rather obliged to you for coming up here; risking taking cold and all. If it'll cheer you up any I'll undertake that anyone ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... and it was quite possible that Senor Ulloa's fortunes might have suffered as severely from the war as his house had suffered from the earthquake. But when I entered the patio I was more than surprised. The only visible signs of life were lizards, darting in and out of their holes, and a huge rattlesnake sunning himself on the ledge of a broken fountain. Grass was growing between the stones; rotten doors hung on rusty hinges; there were great gaps in the roof and huge fissures in the walls, and when I called ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... find no fliers what wants to live un'neath de ground. But crawlers—bugs an' worms an' sich-like—dey mostly does live un'neath de ground, anyhow, an' de fust pusson what come seekin' house-room with Miz. Prairie-Dog was Brother Rattlesnake. ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... Philadelphia, and early in January, 1776, Esek Hopkins, commander in chief, stepped on board of one of them and took command. As he did so, Lieutenant John Paul Jones hoisted a yellow silk flag on which was the device of a pine tree and a coiled rattlesnake and the motto "Don't tread on me." This was the first flag ever displayed on an American man-of-war. Ice delayed the departure of the squadron; but in February it put to sea, went to the Bahama Islands, captured ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... a regular baby, Betty," exclaimed the boy, in disgust. "You'll be saying next that she can make rattlesnake's teeth sprout out ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... winding and lashing itself about his thin dark wrist and arm. It seemed a lifetime that Tony's staring eyes were riveted on the horror of the thing but it really was all over in a moment, and the Indian had choked a brutal rattlesnake, then flung it at his feet. No one spoke for a full minute, then North Eagle said, very quietly, "He curl one foot from your right hand, he lift his head to strike. I wake—I catch him just below his ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... that the Indians, about whom he had been dreaming, were upon him; his next that a rattlesnake clung to his finger; and finally, finding it to be the kitten bestowing some scratches on the hand that sought to bereave it of its prize, he uttered the latter exclamation, first in rage; but pleased that his condition was no worse, soon after called the poor ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... road now, but for the shifting of the sands, would have been marked by the bodies of dead cattle, in death scarcely more bone and parchment than for days they had been while alive. The horned toad, the cactus, the rattlesnake long since had replaced the prairie dogs of the grassy floor of the eastern Plains. A scourge of great black crickets appeared, crackling loathsomely under the wheels. Sagebrush and sand took the place ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... Wilson is the agent of the New York owner of a tract of some thirteen thousand acres of forest, including the greater portion of Mount Mitchell, a wilderness well stocked with bears and deer, and full of streams abounding in trout. It is also the playground of the rattlesnake. With all these attractions Big Tom's life is made lively in watching game poachers, and endeavoring to keep out the foraging cattle of the few neighbors. It is not that the cattle do much injury in the forest, but the looking ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... return from the voyage of the "Rattlesnake," Huxley succeeded in tracing his good Warwickshire friends again. A letter of May 11, 1852, from one of them, Miss K. Jaggard, tells how they had lost sight of the Huxleys after their departure from Coventry; how they were themselves dispersed by death, marriage, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... it, General," he said, in his bluff, abrupt fashion. "It will come rattling about their heads, and they must take to the walls behind, and these will soon give way before a steady cannonade. Or if we take the cannon up to yonder heights of Rattlesnake Hill, we can fling our round shot within their breastwork from end to end, and drive the men back like rabbits to their burrow; or we can plant a battery at the narrow mouth of Lake Champlain, and cut off their ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... men died their friends should burn their bodies and once a year make a great mourning for them and the coyote prevailed. So, presently when deer died, they burned his body, as the coyote had decreed and after a year they made a great mourning for him. But the moon created the rattlesnake and caused it to bite the coyote's son, so that he died. Now, though the coyote had been willing to burn the deer's relations, he refused to burn his own son. Then the moon said unto him, "This is your own rule. You would ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... the Amerindian tribes reverence the rattlesnake as grandfather and king of snakes who is able to give fair winds or cause tempest. Among the Hopi (Moqui) of Arizona the serpent figures largely in one of the dances. The rattlesnake was worshipped in the Natchez temple of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... owned a small red cottage there, which she was ready to lease to Hawthorne for a nominal rent. Lowell was going there on account of his wife, a delicate flower-like nature already beginning to droop. Doctor Holmes was going on account of Lowell, and perhaps with the expectation of seeing a rattlesnake; Fields was going on account of Lowell and Holmes. Mrs. Frances Kemble, already the most distinguished of Shakespearian readers, had a summer cottage there; and it was hoped that in such company Hawthorne would at last find the element to which ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... except for food. Man must first become peaceful, before animals will lose their fierceness. Not long after this instruction had been given, a brother became very tired by traveling and lay down on the ground to sleep. When he awoke, what should he see but a rattlesnake coiled up not more than a foot away from his head. Just then some of the brethren came up and wanted to kill the snake; but the brother said, "No, I'll protect him, for he and I have had a good nap together." He remembered what Joseph ...
— A Young Folks' History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints • Nephi Anderson
... the subtlest appeal is in the sense that warns us of humanness in the way the design spreads into the flare of the bowl. There used to be an Indian woman at Olancha who made bottle-neck trinket baskets in the rattlesnake pattern, and could accommodate the design to the swelling bowl and flat shoulder of the basket without sensible disproportion, and so cleverly that you might own one a year without thinking how it was done; but Seyavi's baskets had a touch beyond cleverness. The weaver and ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... a figure on horse-back appeared at the head of the arroyo. It was Red Bill himself. On his ankle was a bandage, but his amazing vitality had left no other traces of the bite of the rattlesnake. ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... business, and we will talk about California. By the way, I shall only conduct the exercises, for I feel rather embarrassed by the fact that I've never killed, or been killed by, a bear, never been bitten by a tarantula, poisoned by a rattlesnake, assaulted by a stage- robber, nor anything of that sort. You have all read my story of crossing the plains. I even did that in a comparatively easy and unheroic fashion. I only wish, my dear girls and boys, that we had with us some one of the brave and energetic men and women ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... p. 28). In Dr. 33b, 34b and 35b, the serpent is in the act of devouring him, or he is rising up out of the serpent's jaws, as is plainly indicated also by the hieroglyphs, for they contain the group given in Fig. 10, which is composed of the rattle of the rattlesnake and the opened hand as a symbol of seizing and absorption. God B himself is pictured with the body of a serpent in Dr. 35b and 36a (compare No. 2 of the Mythological Animals). He likewise occurs sitting on the serpent and in Dr. 66a he is twice (1st and ...
— Representation of Deities of the Maya Manuscripts • Paul Schellhas
... West are now being cut up into small farms. The nester has come, and come to stay. Gone is the buffalo, the Indian warwhoop, the free grass of the open plain;—even the stinging lizard, the horned frog, the centipede, the prairie dog, the rattlesnake, are fast disappearing. Save in some of the secluded valleys of southern New Mexico, the old-time round-up is no more; the trails to Kansas and to Montana have become grass-grown or lost in fields of waving grain; ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... say; he is not handsome, certainly not beautiful as flowers and the stars and women are, but he has another sort of beauty, I think, such a beauty as made Victor Hugo's monster, Gwynplaine, fascinating, or gives a certain sort of charm to a banded rattlesnake. He is not much like the dove-eyed setter over whom we shot woodcock this afternoon, but to me he is the fairest object on the face of the earth, this gaunt, brindled Ulm. There's such a thing as ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... as the season progressed, coastwise operations in this quarter became increasingly hazardous for both parties. On October 22, Hull wrote that neither the "Enterprise" nor the "Rattlesnake" could cruise much longer. The enemy still maintained his grip, in virtue of greater size and numbers. Ten days later comes the report of a convoy, with one of the brigs, driven into port by a frigate; that the enemy appear almost every ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... heart; he would have struck back as madly as the blind rattlesnake but for the craven ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... scornful eyes drift slowly over him. "I might pretend to misunderstand you. But I won't. You may have your answer now. I am not afraid of you, for since you are a bully you must be a coward. I saw a rattlesnake last week in the hills. It reminded me of some one I have seen. I'll leave you ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... him over the jump at Seven Rivers. You see this Rattlesnake—they calls him Rattlesnake Bark in them later years—is bunked down in one of these yere jim-crow, barn-board hotels. Thar's a resoundin' form of guest in the adjoinin' room, snorin' to beat four kings an' a ace. Rattlesnake ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... instructions into him for some time, he said he might go, until his attendance was required. But Andy moved not; he stood with his eyes fixed by a sort of fascination on some object that seemed to rivet them with the same unaccountable influence which the rattlesnake exercises over ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... to death. I've reconstructed every cell in my body since I hit the beach at Dyea. My flesh is as stringy as whipcords, and as bitter and mean as the bite of a rattlesnake. A few months ago I'd have patted myself on the back to write such words, but I couldn't have written them. I had to live them first, and now that I'm living them there's no need to write them. I'm the real, bitter, stinging goods, and no scrub of a mountaineer can put anything over ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... almost unridable, and would have bucked to death any but a Californian. Sometimes he lived on cactus fruit and the dried meat he had brought with him; occasionally he shot a rabbit. Again he had but the flesh of the rattlesnake roasted over coals. But ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... my dear. You have never been poor," replied Mr. Sheldon, coolly. "I don't suppose I am as much afraid of a rattlesnake as the poor wretches who are accustomed to see one swinging by his tail from the branch of a tree any day in the course of their travels. I have only a vague idea that a cobra de capello is an unpleasant customer; but depend upon ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... down and his head half buried in his overcoat. Jim noticed the reclining figure casually, but thought no more about the man, though his interest might have been aroused if he had chanced to turn quickly for the desperado had raised his head with the quickness of a rattlesnake and his beady eye was fixed with malevolent ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... Chamber of Deputies has organized itself into a chapel. Treasurer and secretary, M. Laborie. Contractor for burials, M. de La Bourdonnaye. Grave-digger, M. Duplessis-Grenedan. Superintendent, M. de Bouville, and in his capacity of vice-president—rattlesnake. Dispenser of holy water (promise-maker), M. de Vitrolles. General of the Capuchins, M. de Villele; and he deserves the post for his voice. Grand almoner, M. de Marcellus, who gives a portion of his own estate to the poor. Bellringers, M. ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... of this large family; some, like the rattlesnake, cannot climb or swim, but crawl along the ground, the terror of unwary travellers who may tread upon them in the dim forest-paths; others are Water-snakes; some, like the Boa and Python, are dreaded, although not venomous, because, of their enormous strength, ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... and look down. His fellows intent on their conversation, were several minutes coming up; but when they did so they witnessed a veritable case of fascination—for the young man was looking intently into the eyes of a large rattlesnake, coiled at his feet; nor could the voices of all his friends arouse him. Being jerked back with some violence, he instantly recovered his senses, but seemed to be puzzled to recall the circumstances connected with his first view of the snake. After a mental effort he explained, while ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... instant Carlos fired. Running forward, we found that he had blown off the head of a huge rattlesnake which his keen eye had detected in the grass, though the rest of us had failed to see it. It proved that his warning was not unnecessary. The creature was over seven feet long, and a bite from its fangs would ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... clearing, and the raspberry-fields are merry with children's voices. The familiar birds and butterflies linger below with them, and in the upper and more sacred depths the wood-thrush chants his litany and the brown mountain butterflies hover among the scented vines. Higher yet rises the "Rattlesnake Ledge," spreading over one side of the summit a black avalanche of broken rock, now overgrown with reindeer-moss and filled with tufts of the smaller wild geranium. Just below this ledge,—amid a dark, dense track of second-growth forest, masked here ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... at the sea, while she thought: "I am sure some awful tragedy is here underneath; it is not only his broken ankle and his illness that has made him such a wreck. I wish I could help them. I would not care a snap for Cis, who is a rattlesnake ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... Oliver. He was well aware of the excellent qualities which the hunter possessed, and he was familiar also with the intense bitterness with which Sam looked upon the Indians. For him they possessed no good qualities. They were simply enemies of the whites and to be exterminated like the rattlesnake and the panther. He recognized no feeling of patriotism on their part, and, because the method of their warfare was cruel, he judged ...
— Scouting with Daniel Boone • Everett T. Tomlinson
... found that he had got into a nest, so to speak, of evil spirits. Before he had been two days with them, he would have given all he possessed, or ever hoped to possess, in order to escape from the "Rattlesnake," ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... went up to Salt Lake I met a little rattlesnake, He'd e't so much of jelly cake, It made his little ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... sentiments beyond egotism, and a family pride which mainly, if not entirely, sprang from it. Such a heart as Garcia's, what a place to nestle in! Such a creature as Coronado seeking comfort in such a breast as his uncle's was very much like a rattlesnake warming himself in a hole of ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... the unmistakable warning of a rattlesnake that was somewhere near him, and on the very point of striking. Precisely where it was, it was impossible to determine with any certainty; but there was no time to consider the matter. It seemed to him in that brief second he devoted to thought that the venomous reptile ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... is called an ancestor and is said to have turned into a lion at his death. Fluctuating opinions (some persons holding to direct descent from a nonhuman object, others to friendly relations between it and the ancestor) are reported in Sumatra, Borneo, and the Moluccas. The Hurons regarded the rattlesnake as a kinsman of their ancestor. The origin of the clan or family is referred to marriage with an animal by the Borneo Dyaks and various tribes on the African Gold Coast, and to marriage with a plant by some of the ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... signal-lights are so remote that we only catch their flash when it has been a myriad of years on its way. For that Supreme One is not a God of pity or mercy—not as we recognize these qualities. Think of a God of mercy who would create the typhus germ, or the house-fly, or the centipede, or the rattlesnake, yet these are all His handiwork. They are a part of the Infinite plan. The minister is careful to explain that all these tribulations are sent for a good purpose; but he hires a doctor to destroy the fever germ, and he kills the rattlesnake when he ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... mentioned the wild turkey—which, indeed, was introduced to Europe from Mexico—partridges, quail, and wild pigeons. The armadillo, beaver, martin, otter, and others are among the Mexican fauna. Of noxious reptiles and insects the rattlesnake is much in evidence, as well as the tarantula, centipede, alacran, or scorpion, and varieties of ants. Of birds of beautiful plumage the Mexican tropics abound with life, and they are famed for their fine feathers, and as songsters. They are an example ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... lightly. "I'm all right, I never felt better. Why, I could whip a rattlesnake right now, and give ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... things a secret they consider a sacred duty. They even refuse to make known the medicinal properties of certain plants, while they are willing, provided they feel a liking for you, or are asked by a person whom they respect or love, to apply these plants, prepared by them, to heal the bite of a rattlesnake, tarantula, or any of the many venomous animals that abound in ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... bludgeon man, bully, rough, hooligan, larrikin[obs3], dangerous classes, ugly customer; thief &c. 792. cockatrice, scorpion, hornet. snake, viper, adder, snake in the grass; serpent, cobra, asp, rattlesnake, anaconda|!. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... "tossed me about the room with his fist on my throat," says Hirsch; "offering to have pity nevertheless, if I would take back the Jewels, and return all writings." [Narrative (in—Tantale—).] Eyes glancing like a rattlesnake's, as we perceive; and such a phenomenon as Hirsch had not expected, this Christmas! In short, the matter has here fairly exploded, and is blazing aloft, as a mass of intricate fuliginous ruin, not to be deciphered henceforth. Such a scene for Chasot on the Christmas-day at Berlin! ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... only a few yards below when, at the last sharp twist in the descent, the still air vibrated with a sibilant rattle. Slade's pony snorted and jumped sideways, leaving Lennon a clear view of the big diamond-back rattlesnake that lay coiled in the middle of the trail. The gaping jaws of the angry snake and the peculiar billowing of its body so fixed Lennon's gaze that he only half glimpsed the final stumble of ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... the master word of the cult. The rattlesnake is "deadly." The copperhead and moccasin are "deadly." So is the wholly mythical puff adder. In hardly less degree is the tarantula "deadly," while varying lethal capacities are ascribed to the centipede, the scorpion, the kissing-bug, and sundry ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... to the Culpepper Minute-men, who wore green hunting shirts with "Liberty or Death" on the bosom in white letters, and who carried a banner which displayed a coiled rattlesnake with the motto, "Don't tread on me." He took a part in the battle of Brandywine, Germantown and Monmouth; he shared the hardships of Valley Forge; in fact saw almost continuous service from the time he enlisted at the ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... listen; you've had a scare, but there is only two snakes around here that is pisen. One is the copperhead. You can tell him by his bright copper-colored head and his strawberry body; the other is the rattlesnake. You can tell him by his rattle. But if you don't be careful foolin' around in the woods and dreamin' and not watchin' what you're doin', one of them will bite you. Now look here, you go home and get in the wood ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... voice that those who heard it say sounded like a rattlesnake's hiss in a refrigerator, Rogers replied: "All meetings where I sit as director vote first and ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... I firmly. "When I want to follow up Cleopatra's fashion, and commit suicide, I am goin' to hire a rattlesnake, and take my poison as she did, on ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... clear down to Amos Judson's house, because I thought that was the best way, if it was an Injun. She isn't afraid of anything else. She's the only girl that can ride Tell Mapleson's pony, and only O'mie and Tell and I among the boys can ride him. And she killed the big rattlesnake that nearly had Jim Conlow, killed it with a hoe. And she can climb where no other girl dares to, on the bluff below town toward the Hermit's Cave. But she's just as 'fraid of an Injun! I went to hunt ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... would eventually become a billiard-marker; and might ultimately be hanged, with general approval. If the man, in his unclipped proportions, did actually exist, it would be right that a combination should be formed to wipe him out of creation. He should be put down,—as you would put down a tiger or a rattlesnake, if found at liberty somewhere in the Midland Counties. A more hateful character, to all who possess a grain of moral discernment, could not even be imagined. And it need not be shown that the conception of such a character is worthy only of a baby. However many years the man who deliberately and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... far, when Sandy gave a wild whoop of alarm, jumping about six feet backward as he yelled, "A rattlesnake!" Sure enough, an immense snake was sliding out from under a mass of brush that the boy had disturbed as he gathered an armful of dry branches and twigs. Dropping his burden, Sandy shouted, "Kill him! ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... so innocently had two meanings. He might have meant that the cawing of the crows indicated that they were objecting to a rattlesnake sunning on some rock. Also he might have meant to say that their short, querulous cawing betrayed the presence ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... fifteen to twenty minutes, until some symptoms of intoxication are experienced, then cease using it. The cure will be complete as soon as enough has been taken to produce even slight symptoms of intoxication. It is remarkable how much alcohol a patient suffering from the poison of the Rattlesnake ...
— An Epitome of Homeopathic Healing Art - Containing the New Discoveries and Improvements to the Present Time • B. L. Hill
... Colonel Stevens, "Old Pecksniff," as the irreverent youngsters called him, the commander at Fort Emory on the outskirts of Gate City, telling of a tremendous storm that had swept the Laramie plains and the range of the Medicine Bow and Rattlesnake Hills, just after Lieutenant Dean had been sent forth with a small party of troopers to push through to Warrior Gap with a big sum of money, ten thousand dollars in cash, for the payment of contractors and their men at the new post, ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... rest on the prophecy of the bridge. Lean not your hand on it, for it is as if you put it forth to lean it on a coiled rattlesnake." ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... mouth of Marie, whom Jake Rule, Kansas Casey, and four other men were taking to the calaboose. They were doing their duty as gently as possible, and Marie was making it as difficult for them as possible. She was as mad as a teased rattlesnake, and not a man of her six captors but bore the marks of fingernails, ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... natives teeth, was it not that they could pull out the upper and lower incisors, file them in points, and curve them in sharp fangs like the fangs of a rattlesnake? If she has placed nails at the end of the fingers, is it not that they may grow so immoderately that the use of the hand is rendered almost impossible? If the skin, black or brown, covers the human frame, is it not so as to zebra it by "temmbos" or tattooings representing trees, ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... kill twice dead a rattlesnake, And off his scaly skin to take, And through his head to drive a stake, And every bone within him break, And of his flesh mincemeat to make, To burn, to sear, to boil, and bake, Then in a heap the whole to rake, ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... me. "That single trail I found back yonder day before yesterday was Santan's running on ahead of us to poison the water for us and then steal a horse and make his way back to the mountains. An Apache can live on this cactus-covered sand the same as a rattlesnake. He fixed the upper spring and came down here to drink. Only Beverly's conscience saved him here. Heaven knows how Fred Ramer got out here. He may have come with some Mexicans on ahead of us and left them here to drop his poison in this lower spring. Then he turned back ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... strongholds. It was a fortified village, built on the summit of a mountain, and accessible only at one point. The battle lasted three hours, the Indians being finally driven off with the loss of sixty men. It was reported in San Jose that the Indians had surprised a company of seventy-two men, on Rattlesnake Creek, and murdered them all. In consequence of these occurrences, the Governor dispatched Col. Johnson to the scene of disturbance, ordered out 200 men, and applied to Gen. Smith for the assistance of the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... when they came upon them, but would pass by on the other side of the path, believing that if they were to kill a serpent, the reptile's kindred would destroy some of their brethren, friends, or relations in return. So the Seminole Indians spared the rattlesnake, because they feared that the soul of the dead rattlesnake would incite its kinsfolk to take vengeance. The Cherokee regard the rattlesnake as the chief of the snake tribe and fear and respect him accordingly. Few Cherokee will venture to kill ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... as though I had thrust into his hand a drop of vitriol, and, leaping in the air, threw the ice on the floor and dared any one to touch it. From the "personal" boys who had travelled to Matadi the Mission boys had heard of ice. But none had ever seen it. They approached it as we would a rattlesnake. Each touched it and then sprang away. Finally one, his eyes starting from his head, cautiously stroked the inoffensive brick and then licked his fingers. The effect was instantaneous. He assured the others it was "good chop," and each of them sat hunched about it on his heels, stroking ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... of the prowler—and that is the end of both animals. For Unk Wunk has a weapon that no prowler of the woods ever calculates upon. His broad, heavy tail is armed with hundreds of barbs, smaller but more deadly than those on his back; and he swings this weapon with the vicious sweep of a rattlesnake. It is probably this power of driving his barbs home by a lightning blow of his tail that has given rise to the curious delusion that Unk Wunk can shoot his quills at a distance, as if he were filled with compressed air—which is, of course, a harmless absurdity that ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... these profitable beasts we have also in this country lions, bears, wolves, foxes, and particularly very many snakes, which are large and as long as eight, ten, and twelve feet. Among others, there is a sort of snake, which we call rattlesnake, from a certain object which it has back upon its tail, two or three fingers' breadth long, and has ten or twelve joints, and with this it makes a noise like the crickets. Its color is variegated much like our large brindled bulls. These snakes have very sharp teeth in ...
— Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664 • Various
... instructive prophet. John Bull is asleep, or rather in a vision; the cunning demon, Speculation, blowing a thousand bright bubbles about him. Meanwhile the rooks are busy at his fob, a knave has cut a cruel hole in his pocket, a rattlesnake has coiled safe round his feet, and will in a trice swallow Bull, chair, money and all; the rats are at his corn-bags (as if, poor devil, he had corn to spare); his faithful dog is bolting his leg-of-mutton—nay, ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a cord was passed, so that it could be worn pendent from the neck; the jaw of a bear designed to be worn in the same manner as the eagle's claw, and supplied with a cord to suspend it around the neck; two rattlesnake-skins, one of these had fourteen rattles upon it, these were neatly folded up; some vegetable colors done up in leaves; a small bunch of deer sinews, resembling cat-gut in appearance; several bunches of thread and twine, two and three threaded, ...
— Rambles in the Mammoth Cave, during the Year 1844 - By a Visiter • Alexander Clark Bullitt
... earth, and sea, and sky, hill and plain, spread out like an ever-changing picture before the eyes, while to the ears there came no sound more harsh than the shrill notes of the woodland birds. There came also the noise of the rattlesnake very often, Mr Stevenson says, but they did not realise its sinister significance until almost the end of their sojourn there, when their attention was drawn to it, and certainly no ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... stiff back, black beard, short hair, loud voice, and buff waistcoat, people of fashion, on the contrary, stand in continual awe; his tongue is to them a rattlesnake's tail wagging only as a signal for them to get out of his way; they quiver like an aspen at the sound of his voice, and for their own particular, would rather hear the sharpening of a saw: if such a one courts their acquaintance, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... we were afraid of snakes, but soon learned that most of them were harmless. The only venomous species seen on our farm were the rattlesnake and the copperhead, one of each. David saw the rattler, and we both saw the copperhead. One day, when my brother came in from his work, he reported that he had seen a snake that made a queer buzzy noise with its tail. This was the only rattlesnake ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... faithful slave in all the Southland than old Uncle Snake-bit Bob. He had been bitten by a rattlesnake when he was a boy, and the limb had to be amputated, and its place was supplied with a wooden peg. There were three or four other "Bobs" on the plantation, and he was called Snake-bit to distinguish him. Though lame, and sick a good deal of his time, his life had not been wasted, nor had he ...
— Diddie, Dumps & Tot - or, Plantation child-life • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... have been just as well if the rattlesnake coiled in his path at that moment had ended his existence, but the snake was indeed an honorable highwayman, and sounded a gentlemanly warning in the nick of time. Collins would have killed it for its pains, but killing had ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... vindictive eye of the old man struck du Tillet, whose attention had first been attracted by a watch-chain from which hung a pound of jingling gew-gaws, and by a green coat with a collar whimsically cocked up, which gave the old man the semblance of a rattlesnake. The banker approached the usurer to find out how and why he had ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... hostage—he knew not why—on a galloping horse in the dust of the prairie—far beyond the seas! It was only when he saw her cheek flush and pale, when he saw her staring at him with helpless, frightened, but fascinated eyes,—the eyes of the fluttering bird under the spell of the rattlesnake,—that he drew his breath and turned bewildered away. "And do you know, dear," she said with naive simplicity to her sister that evening, "that although he was an American, and everybody says that they don't care at all for those poor Indians, he ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... Sunday to my surprise I saw one of the men reading a book. On looking at the title, it read: 'The Life of Rattlesnake Pete,' and another man had a book lying on his blankets, entitled 'The Adventures of Coyote Bill.' Gambling was their favorite pastime. It was one round of card playing nights and Sundays. When I first went to work on the Lonsdale ranch, the boss put me to cutting oak wood. After I ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... little head out of the door of the kennel, and was just about to creep out, when right in front of him in the path he saw a snake. He knew in a moment just what sort of a snake it was, and how dangerous it was; he knew it was a rattlesnake, and that if it bit Ada or him, they would probably die. For Marland had spent two summers on his papa's big ranch in Kansas, and he had been told over and over again, if he ever saw a snake to run away from it as fast as he could, and this snake just in front of him was making the queer little ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... don't get the rattlesnake for this!" swore Neil between his teeth. "Ain't there nothin' I can ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... he heard a vicious, locust-like whir, whose meaning he recognized. An immense rattlesnake was in the bushes, and Fred had descended almost upon it. But for the tremendous effort of Jack he would have dropped squarely upon the velvety body, with consequences too frightful to be thought of; but his great leap carried him ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... deer," acknowledged Ware, reluctantly, "though I hate to think that rattlesnake is out for anything legitimate. I will say he's a good hunter; ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... irritated. "Doctor! You know these French Canadians. They're worse scared of a doctor than of the evil one himself. Pete's usin' some old woman's stuff on his wounds,—bear's grease, rattlesnake oil, catnip tea,—what do I know? I can't ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... Him sometime do that. But no. Mister snake he go sleep in tent which is reserve for his superior. I say nothing, for I do not wish to alarm the young ladies. That is why I hold the dog Mumble so tight, for he small eye see snake too, an' fool dog wish to go fight him. Rattlesnake soon eat Mumble up—eh? But never mind; there is no worry. I am Wampus, an' I am here. You go to bed now, an' sleep ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... Mo-hawk; bludgeon man, bully, rough, hooligan, larrikin^, dangerous classes, ugly customer; thief &c 792. cockatrice, scorpion, hornet. snake, viper, adder, snake in the grass; serpent, cobra, asp, rattlesnake, anaconda^. canker-worm, wire-worm; locust, Colorado beetle; alacran^, alligator, caymon^, crocodile, mosquito, mugger, octopus; torpedo; bane &c 663. cutthroat &c (killer) 461. cannibal; anthropophagus^, anthropophagist^; bloodsucker, vampire, ogre, ghoul, gorilla, vulture; gyrfalcon^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... reply, but pointed to a corner near the door. I looked in the direction indicated, and by the dim light of the lamp saw to my horror—a rattlesnake. I looked around for Dick; he was leaning against the wall, his face ghastly pale. Before I was aware of it Dick had kicked in the strong door. Osborne must have had the same idea for he too rushed for the door. They both reached the threshold ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... by an alligator, and six had given out on the march and probably perished. The survivors had encountered interesting experiences. They had crossed the Colorado on a raft. Nika, La Salle's favorite Shawanoe hunter, who had followed him to France and thence to Texas, had been bitten by a rattlesnake, but had recovered. Among the Cenis Indians, a branch of the Caddo family, which includes the famed Pawnees, they met with the friendliest welcome and saw plenty of horses, silver lamps, swords, muskets, money, and other articles, all Spanish, which these ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... this time, about which he talked loudly, with his mouth full, all dinner time, was the building of the Tunkhannock, Rattlesnake and Young-womans-town railroad, which would not only be a great highway to the west, but would open to market inexhaustible coal-fields and untold millions of lumber. The plan of ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... rattlesnake) restrains the water by coiling itself into a sac to hold up the rain and so prevent it from reaching the earth. In the various American codices this episode is depicted in as great a variety of forms as the Vedic poets of India ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... this archer, who deliberately drew an arrow from over his shoulder and fitted it against the string of his bow. The fact that the missile was undoubtedly coated at the end with a virus more deadly than that of the rattlesnake or cobra was enough to render the would-be friend uncomfortable ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... Voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, commanded by the late Captain Owen Stanley, during the years 1846-50, including Discoveries and Surveys in New Guinea, the Louisiade Archipelago, &c. &c. By John Macgillivray, F.R.G.S., Naturalist to the Expedition. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... which she obtained from her mother. The circumstance attracted the attention of the mother, who desired her husband to follow the child, and observe what she did with it. On coming to the child, he found her engaged in feeding several snakes, called yellow heads, a species of rattlesnake. He immediately took her away and proceeded to the house for his gun, and returning, killed two of them at one shot, and another a few days after. The child called these reptiles in the manner of calling chickens; and when her father observed, if she continued the practice they would ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... not quite hittin' the mark, either. A rattlesnake rattles before he strikes. I say mean people are more like the copperhead, that hides in the grass and leaves that are like its own color, and when you ain't expectin' it and without any warnin', he'll ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... horror as a large moccasin snake darted across his path; but seeing the loathsome creature glide away to a safe distance, he went on, following the guide. Nevertheless, a chill ran down his spine when he thought how narrowly he had escaped stumbling full tilt upon the reptile, which, unlike the rattlesnake, never gives ...
— The Boy Scouts on Picket Duty • Robert Shaler
... horse before four large holes and pointed at them with his riding-whip. "Gopher in that one," he declared without hesitation. "Mr. Gopher is away from the next one, out getting his dinner likely; a coon lives in the next, but he is away from home. Rattlesnake, and a big one, lives in the fourth, but he is also away from home, I ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... of that day of horror, he could scarcely stand. He had to catch himself now and then, and lean against a building and get his bearings. Most of the men, when they came out, made straight for a saloon—they seemed to place fertilizer and rattlesnake poison in one class. But Jurgis was too ill to think of drinking—he could only make his way to the street and stagger on to a car. He had a sense of humor, and later on, when he became an old hand, he used to think it fun ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... had late become the terror of foot-passengers in London crowds. My aunt pointed with a pride that was colonial to the fine light which the towns-people had erected on Beacon Hill; and told me pretty legends of Rattlesnake Hill that fired the desire to explore those inland dangers. I noticed that the rubble-faced houses showed lanterns in iron clamps above most of the doorways. My kinsman's house stood on the verge of the wilds-rough stone ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... horned toad creeping along the sand, The rattlesnake asleep beneath the sage, Have now a subtle fatal charm. In their sultry calm, their love of heat, I read once more the burning page Of nature under cloudless skies. O pitiless and splendid land! Mine eyelids close, my lips are dry By ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... no use talking to you. You call yourself Jason because of your yellow hair, or your love for the golden fleece; but your old comrades call you 'Rattlesnake,' and you have its ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... trying for a good many hours to balance the right and wrong of this matter in my mind, and my reason had insisted to my inclination that, if I had opportunity, I must kill Pemaou without warning. We respect no code in dealing with a rattlesnake, and I must use this Huron like the vermin that he was. So I ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... to leave the ourang-outang behind," Marble carelessly observed, as he took his own seat, after assisting in getting the boat round, with its head towards the bay. "I would rather have a rattlesnake for a pet, ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... great danger for generally the little reptiles are tame indoors, but out of doors in the sunshine they become cross and ugly and their bite is more dangerous than that of a rattlesnake. ...
— Little Tales of The Desert • Ethel Twycross Foster
... pet, eh, Robert?" said Colonel Cummings, as they entered. He backed up to his stove and surveyed Squaw Charley good-naturedly. "Let me see, now: You've run the scale from a devil's darning-needle to a baby wolf. Next thing, I suppose, you'll be introducing us to a youngish rattlesnake." ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... Now, a rattlesnake is poisonous, but he gives fair warning; a swamp moccasin lies in wait for the unwary and strikes without sign or sound. Into Hiram Strong's troubled mind came the thought that Mr. Pepper was striking like his ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... the way to it led up a shallow draw past the cattle corral. Grandmother called my attention to a stout hickory cane, tipped with copper, which hung by a leather thong from her belt. This, she said, was her rattlesnake cane. I must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife; she had killed a good many rattlers on her way back and forth. A little girl who lived on the Black Hawk road was bitten on the ankle and had been sick ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... a little boy I suppose his mother used to call him Davy. He wasn't bad then; just a little boy to be cuddled and petted. Perhaps he was married. Perhaps he had a sweetheart waiting for him outside, and praying for him. And they snuffed his life out as if he had been a rattlesnake." ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... daily adventures, and brought to her the occasional results of his single-handed combats with birds and beasts. He offered to dig up a tarantula's nest for her and to catch and tame for her pleasure a side-winder rattlesnake, or, if she preferred, a golden oriole or a mocking-bird. It did n't make any difference to him whether she chose a rattlesnake or an oriole; whatever she wanted him to do, he was ready to attempt. And Madge looked and listened ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... handkerchief and studying a bold hump of jumbled bowlders and ledges, evidently considering whether it was worth while toiling up to the top. A little below him, the Native Son was flinging rocks at a rattlesnake with the vicious precision of frank abhorrence. Down in the canon bottom Big Medicine and Pink were holding the horses on the shady side of the gorge, and the smoke of their cigarettes floated lazily upward with the jumbled monotone ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... everything for granted, and spared each other the most wearisome bore of English and Scotch life, the stories of the big game they killed. A bear was an occasional amusement; a wapiti was a constant necessity; but the only wild animal dangerous to man was a rattlesnake or a skunk. One shot for amusement, but one had other matters to ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... is drawn to the rattlesnake's power, As the smoker's eye fills at the opium hour, As a horse reaches up to the manger above, As the waiting ear yearns for the whisper of love, From the arms of the Bride, iron-visaged and slow, The Captain bent down to the Head ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... the pole under it and slung it ashore. "There! how do you like that?" said he, and he headed the boat upstream again. It was a "copper-bellied moccasin," he declared, whatever that may be, and was worse than a rattlesnake. ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... off down Plum Bun at night, moon or no moon. There's a rattlesnake or copperhead for every hundred yards!" It was Frank who took up Jerry's thought. "Besides, it would be different if we hadn't waited so long. Tod—Tod's—he's dead now," voicing at last the feeling they had never before put ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... crush him as I would a rattlesnake. Because I wish to ruin him so that he will be left in my debt. So that I can hound him from this place by holding that debt over his head. It is worth two thousand to me to possess that power. Now, ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... crime, and the law would hold his slayer guiltless, there would be a deal less sin and misery in this world. As for me, Hannah, I feel it to be my solemn duty to Nora, to womankind, and to the world, to seek out the wretch as wronged her and kill him where I find him, just as I would a rattlesnake as ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... noise of their rattles sometimes when the sun is sinking behind the swamp. (The deadly rattle of the rattlesnake ...
— Second Plays • A. A. Milne
... Blackfoot boy was crouching at his elbow, and some terrible thing was winding and lashing itself about his thin dark wrist and arm. It seemed a lifetime that Tony's staring eyes were riveted on the horror of the thing but it really was all over in a moment, and the Indian had choked a brutal rattlesnake, then flung it at his feet. No one spoke for a full minute, then North Eagle said, very quietly, "He curl one foot from your right hand, he lift his head to strike. I wake—I catch him just below ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... to his fine collection of living snakes. Lithely the blacksnake uncoils in his sight. Voluminously the bloated boa convolves before him. All horrent the cobra exalts his hooded head, and the spanning jaws fly open. Quivers and chitters the tail of the cheerful rattlesnake; silently slips out the forked tongue, and is as silently absorbed. The fangless adder warps up the leg of the Professor, lays clammy coils about his neck, and pokes a flattened head curiously into his open mouth. The young man of Colusa is interested; ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... joyously. "But I haven't heard that name for twenty years. And you're the boy whose father was a doctor, and who helped us build our Indian camp, and who had the frog, and fell off the roof, and killed the rattlesnake." ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... and plain, spread out like an ever-changing picture before the eyes, while to the ears there came no sound more harsh than the shrill notes of the woodland birds. There came also the noise of the rattlesnake very often, Mr Stevenson says, but they did not realise its sinister significance until almost the end of their sojourn there, when their attention was drawn to it, and certainly no ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... "Rattlesnake Gulch" was a name given to a deep depression on the Kentucky side of the river, and within one hundred yards of the stream. It was less than a half a mile in advance of where the two rangers were seated on the fallen tree, as the summer day was drawing ...
— The Phantom of the River • Edward S. Ellis
... Arriving in the United States, he purchased an estate not far from New York and built himself a handsome mansion, but a year later retribution came from an unlooked-for quarter, for he was bitten by a rattlesnake and died in the most horrible agonies both of ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... I had another queer bout with some thieves. They were not after the land this time, but they planned to get at the ore and carry off as much of the gold as they could lay hands on. Our old friend, Rattlesnake Mike, caught them red-handed, and now they are serving a term in ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... three words of this harangue may be doubted. The sight of that yellowish paper did the business for him. His expression vibrated from that of a mad rattlesnake to that of a dog with the most downcast extremities. At last he rushed to the door, saying he "would stand no ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... the part of the natives was by this archer, who deliberately drew an arrow from over his shoulder and fitted it against the string of his bow. The fact that the missile was undoubtedly coated at the end with a virus more deadly than that of the rattlesnake or cobra was enough to render the would-be friend uncomfortable ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... that his own household was safe. It was not until the morning dawned that the true nature and extent of the sudden movement was ascertained. A great seam had opened above the long cliff, and the terrible Rattlesnake Ledge, with all its envenomed reptiles, its dark fissures and black caverns, was buried forever beneath a mighty ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... water-bucket, contributed floral beauty and variety. The distance was undulating prairie, bisected by stretches of the intermittent streams peculiar to the region lined with the rich green of live-oak and water-elm. A richly mottled rattlesnake lay coiled beneath a pale green clump of prickly pear in the foreground. A third of the canvas was ultramarine and lake white—the typical Western sky and the flying clouds, rainless ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... the fact, the possession of poison might well seem a wonderful gift. That a fluid, harmless in one animal itself, should yet prove so deadly when transferred to others, is certainly very remarkable; and though the venom of the Cobra or the Rattlesnake appeal perhaps more effectively to our imagination, we have conclusive evidence of concentrated poison even in the bite of a midge, which may remain for days perceptible. The sting of a Bee or Wasp, though somewhat similar in its effect, is a totally different ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... being this day. Some wild cattle rushed up to us and away from us; antelope stared at us from a hundred yards; coyotes ran skulking through the sage-brush to watch us from a hill; at our noon meal we killed a rattlesnake and shot some young sage chickens, which were good at supper, roasted at ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... I, striking as quickly as a rattlesnake, 'and there are lots more where these came from! Now, look here, Andrews, you know mighty well that my line of stuff is a lot better than the one that you're buying from. If you think more of the babies of the man you are buying your hats from than you ...
— Tales of the Road • Charles N. Crewdson
... Buffalo Chief, surprised, "to the Buffalo roads, of course. We must be changing pasture." As he pawed contempt upon the short, dry grass, the rattlesnake, that had been sunning himself at the foot of the hummock, slid away under the bleached buffalo skull, and the small, furry things dived everywhere into ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... young lying together in a nest of dry grass, and, wonderful to tell, a large venomous snake coiled up amongst them. The snake was the dreaded vivora de la cruz, as the gauchos call it, a pit-viper of the same family as the fer-de-lance, the bush-master, and the rattlesnake. It was about three feet long, very thick in proportion, and with broad head and blunt tail. It came forth hissing and striking blindly right and left when the dogs pulled the opossums out, but was killed with a blow of the ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... a bad enemy," Harry said as he tossed off his portion. "As a rule there ain't no doubt that one is better without it; but there is no better medicine to carry about with you. I have seen many a life saved by a bottle of whisky. Taken after the bite of a rattlesnake, it is as good a thing as there is. In case of fever, and when a man is just tired out after a twenty-four hours' tramp, a drop of it will put new life into him for a bit. But I don't say as it hasn't killed a sight more than it ...
— In The Heart Of The Rockies • G. A. Henty
... bit of meat in his hand, and the creature came to meet him; but what was his surprise when he saw that he had to deal with a remarkably large and well-fed rat! Now, rats were detested by him; he could not even bear the sight of them. He would almost have preferred to see a rattlesnake in his room, and he uttered a cry of ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... well knows, are to be given to the public in next week's illustrated paper. The feathered end of his shaft titillates harmlessly enough, but too often the arrowhead is crusted with a poison worse than the Indian gets by mingling the wolf's gall with the rattlesnake's venom. No man is safe whose unguarded threshold the mischief-making questioner has crossed. The more unsuspecting, the more frank, the more courageous, the more social is the subject of his vivisection, the more easily does he get at his vital secrets, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... supposed to neutralize the venom of serpents. The notion that snakes are afraid of an ash-tree is not extinct even in the United States. The other day I was told, not by an old granny, but by a man fairly educated and endowed with a very unusual amount of good common-sense, that a rattlesnake will sooner go through fire than creep over ash leaves or into the shadow of an ash-tree. Exactly the same statement is made by Piny, who adds that if you draw a circle with an ash rod around the spot of ground on which a snake is ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... overland mail road, which we had followed since leaving Los Angeles, and keeping up the south bank of the Gila to White's Ranch; thence to the celebrated ruins of the Casa Blanca, so graphically described by Mr. John R. Bartlett in his "Personal Narratives" of the Boundary Commission; thence to Rattlesnake Spring; thence to old Fort Breckenridge, which had been so cowardly deserted the year before by our regular troops; thence to Canon de Oro. As we now approached Tucson, everything was in fighting trim. A short halt was made near the town, and the cavalry company, in two divisions, approached ...
— Frontier service during the rebellion - or, A history of Company K, First Infantry, California Volunteers • George H. Pettis
... is braver and will fight when cornered. It is frequently found in cornfields, hence its name. The Pilot Black Snake or Mountain Black Snake is often taken for the Common Black Snake. Its head is larger and it is spotted with white. It is a snake frequently found in the same locations as the rattlesnake and copperhead. The Chicken Snake is fond of eggs and young chickens. Like the Fox Snake it will emit an unpleasant ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... subject-matter was under discussion: he found a means to have a throw at the Administration, and of consequence, at Clay; and bargain and corruption slid from his tongue with the concentration of venom of the rattlesnake. The very thought of Clay seemed to inspire his genius for vituperation; his eye would gleam, his meagre and attenuated form would writhe and contort as if under the enchantment of a demon; his long, bony fingers would be extended, as if pointing at an imaginary Clay, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... Philadelphia, from which city, one morning in January, 1776, a fleet of eight vessels set sail. As they were about to weigh anchor, John Paul Jones, a lieutenant on the flagship, flung to the breeze a yellow silk flag on which were a pine tree and a coiled rattlesnake, with this motto: "Don't tread on me." This was the first flag ever ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... had been trying for a good many hours to balance the right and wrong of this matter in my mind, and my reason had insisted to my inclination that, if I had opportunity, I must kill Pemaou without warning. We respect no code in dealing with a rattlesnake, and I must use this Huron like the vermin that he was. ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... looking about him, trying to make something of his strange experiences, when his eye was caught by a glitter and a gleam in the grass, which caused him to spring affrightedly backward, as from the glittering eye and gleaming crest of a rattlesnake. But no serpent was there. The more the pity! Only the red moccasins, adjusted side by side, with their old air of easy self-assurance, and now in open view before him. Yet, but the moment previous his ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... though they would have fought perhaps if driven to bay, their one idea seemed to be to seek safety in flight. It was the same with the poisonous serpents, the most dangerous being a kind of miniature rattlesnake which was too sluggish and indifferent to get out of the traveller's way, and many a poor fellow suffered from ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... was a fortified village, built on the summit of a mountain, and accessible only at one point. The battle lasted three hours, the Indians being finally driven off with the loss of sixty men. It was reported in San Jose that the Indians had surprised a company of seventy-two men, on Rattlesnake Creek, and murdered them all. In consequence of these occurrences, the Governor dispatched Col. Johnson to the scene of disturbance, ordered out 200 men, and applied to Gen. Smith for the assistance ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... reverence; the Moqui Indians have their sacred snake dance, in which they worship the reptiles, handling the most vicious and poisonous rattlesnakes with seeming impunity; the Apaches hold that every rattlesnake is an emissary of the devil;[49] "the Piutes of Nevada have a demon deity in the form of a serpent still supposed to exist in the waters of Pyramid Lake;"[50] on the wall of an ancient Aztec ruin at Palenque there is a tablet, on which there is a cross standing on the head ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... expected that you will engage in any bear hunt on your first arrival, but will wait until you know something about the mode of hunting them. It frequently happens on the hunt that you come in contact with a rattlesnake. He will give you timely notice by springing his rattles, which you will do well to heed. It is a well-known fact that Northern invalids are not afraid of alligators, bears, snakes, pole cats or any of ...
— The Dismal Swamp and Lake Drummond, Early recollections - Vivid portrayal of Amusing Scenes • Robert Arnold
... lightly and swiftly on before me; I with my heavy boots crushing into the brittle, delicate, and sponge-like coral, startling from their sunbaths hundreds of black and orange-banded sea-snakes—reptiles whose bite is as deadly as that of a rattlesnake, but which hastened out of our way almost as soon as they heard our footsteps. Here and there we had to turn aside to avoid deep pools, some of which, though not more than ten fathoms in width, were as blue as the ocean beyond, their ...
— The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton - 1902 • Louis Becke
... capt'in, 'I relies on you, Joe.'—'E always did—and would you believe it, I upped an' 'ooked that there great rattlesnake out of the boiler with ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... down in festoons and ropelike lines to the ground, along which they ran, often assuming the appearance of huge serpents; indeed, more than once, as I paced up and down, I could not help fancying that an anaconda, or boa-constrictor, or rattlesnake was creeping towards us. In the centre of the small open space was the fire, with my companions sleeping round it; near them the pile of baggage and the overturned boat; while the dark stream flowed by with a murmuring sound. Beyond, though we were sheltered from the wind, I could see the ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston
... this has been developed by Dr. Harrison Allen, in the prevalence of what he calls the "crotalean curve," in aboriginal American art, a line which is the radical of the profile view of the head of the rattlesnake (crotalus).[208-1] This he has detected in the architectural monuments of Mexico and Yucatan, in the Maya phonetic scrip, and even in the rude efforts of the savage tribes. Each of these elective methods of representing the serpent, would itself, by independent association, ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... cross the ridge into a deep ravine that leads here where I am. You'll be out of sight all the way up once you hit the ravine. I'd—I'd worm along pretty spry if I was you, going down as far as the scrub oak—say, about as swift as a rattlesnake strikes—and pray any little prayers you happen to remember. And say, Pringle, before you go ... I'm rather obliged to you for coming up here; risking taking cold and all. If it'll cheer you up any I'll undertake that anyone getting you on the ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... fronds each of the Buck Fern and Cystoptiris or Bladder Fern, with at least three kinds of moss complete the list of "Flowerless Plants." Three little clumps of Violets are sending out new leaves. There are a few leaves of Partridge-berry vine, a yellow Oxalis, an Orchid called Rattlesnake-Plantain, having lovely velvety leaves veined with white, a few sprigs of Mouse-ear Chickweed, and, last of all, a leaf of a Jack-in-the-Pulpit plant, the corm of which was doubtless hidden among ...
— The Mayflower, January, 1905 • Various
... at the mercy of the sun, and is high or low, according as that rises or sets in the heavens. At Martinique, where at noonday it darts its devouring rays perpendicularly upon the cane-fields, and every one flies into the shade to escape its scorching heat, the rattlesnake traverses the country, monarch of all he surveys; he strikes rapidly with a vigorous tail upon the calcined ground; and woe then to any one who receives his bite! All the fire of the atmosphere has passed into his frame. Now go to the Zoological Gardens, and ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... of new black corduroy trousers, yellow button shoes, a blue woollen shirt with a large scarlet silk handkerchief tied around the neck, a pair of beaded buckskin gloves with fringe dependent from the gauntlet, and a broad white beaver hat with a rattlesnake-skin band. Across the windshield of the Napier he fastened an orange-coloured pennant bearing in bright green letters the legend: MY CITY—SEQUOIA. As a safety-first precaution against man and beast en route, he buckled a gun-scabbard to the spare tires on the running-board and slipped a rifle ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... anyway, drunk or sober, and I didn't know much what happened, except that I refused to drink in his company and he cursed me out and I blacked an eye for him before they separated us. Well, sir, next day, here was Hector demanding that I go and apologize to Link. I said I'd as soon apologize to a rattlesnake, and Hector upbraided me in his rhetoric, but with a whole lot of real feeling, too. He was even pathetic about it: put it on the ground that I owed it to morality, by which he meant Hector. I was known to be his most intimate friend; I had done him an irrecoverable ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... struck du Tillet, whose attention had first been attracted by a watch-chain from which hung a pound of jingling gew-gaws, and by a green coat with a collar whimsically cocked up, which gave the old man the semblance of a rattlesnake. The banker approached the usurer to find out how and why he had thus ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... to business, and we will talk about California. By the way, I shall only conduct the exercises, for I feel rather embarrassed by the fact that I've never killed, or been killed by, a bear, never been bitten by a tarantula, poisoned by a rattlesnake, assaulted by a stage- robber, nor anything of that sort. You have all read my story of crossing the plains. I even did that in a comparatively easy and unheroic fashion. I only wish, my dear girls and boys, that we had with us some one ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... he said to himself, with a sudden shiver of delight, "I honestly believe it would fill in that hole, so that not even a rattlesnake could crawl out. Oh! if those men are in there, as I hope, and I could start that cap-stone rolling, wouldn't they be shut up as snug as if they were in a bottle, with the ...
— The Boy Scouts' First Camp Fire - or, Scouting with the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... has the insect disappeared underground than a sort of shrill rattling is heard, a "true death-song," immediately followed by the completest silence. "Only a moment, and the unfortunate creature is absolutely dead, proboscis outstretched and limbs relaxed. The bite of the rattlesnake would not produce a more ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... turkey—which, indeed, was introduced to Europe from Mexico—partridges, quail, and wild pigeons. The armadillo, beaver, martin, otter, and others are among the Mexican fauna. Of noxious reptiles and insects the rattlesnake is much in evidence, as well as the tarantula, centipede, alacran, or scorpion, and varieties of ants. Of birds of beautiful plumage the Mexican tropics abound with life, and they are famed for their fine feathers, and as songsters. They ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... issued from the mouth of Marie, whom Jake Rule, Kansas Casey, and four other men were taking to the calaboose. They were doing their duty as gently as possible, and Marie was making it as difficult for them as possible. She was as mad as a teased rattlesnake, and not a man of her six captors but bore the marks of ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... their natural food, which is live mice, rats, gophers, squirrels, young rabbits, and sometimes, though rarely, birds. Then it is they become alert, and the horny appendage on their tails vibrates with a high-pitched, buzzing sound, simulating, although not similar to, the sound of a poisonous rattlesnake. ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke
... snared and shot them. Once a little boy set a snare for one, and lay flat on the ground a little way from the hole, holding the end of the string. Presently he felt something move and pulled in a huge rattlesnake; and to this day, his name is "Caught-the-Rattlesnake." Very often a boy got a new name in some such manner. At another time, we were playing in the woods and found a fawn's track. We followed and caught it while ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... survivals in Jimmie Time—for I found him still a two-gun man. He wore them rather consciously sagging from his lean hips—almost pompously, it seemed. Nor did he appear properly unconscious of his remaining attire—of the broad-brimmed hat, its band of rattlesnake skin; of the fringed buckskin shirt, opening gallantly across his pinched throat; of his corduroy trousers, fitting bedraggled; ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... live to its liking, to obey its genius, and to serve its interests, has hitherto resulted in little, save the singing of the Marseillaise, (the Marseillaise of Slavery!) and the striking down of the Federal colors before the flag of the pelican and the rattlesnake. A great many blue ribbons and Colt's revolvers are sold; and busts of Calhoun, the first theorist of secession, axe carried about ostentatiously. Next, to present a good mien to the eyes of Europe, a Constitution is voted in haste, a government is formed, ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... settlement. For a description of the habits and the character of the Australian and Papuan races, which people the Peninsula and the adjacent islands of Torres Straits, the reader is referred to the interesting narrative of the voyage of the Rattlesnake, by Mr. John McGillivray, in which the subject is ably and exhaustively treated, and which leaves but little to ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... squatting. When I first tried to enter, I found it so given over to poison-oak and rattlesnakes that I did not care to pursue my investigations very far. I did not know at that time that I was quite immune from the poison of the oak and that the California rattlesnake was quite so friendly and harmless an animal as John Muir has since assured us that he is. The last time that I passed Silverado, it was accessible only by the aid of ...
— The Sea Fogs • Robert Louis Stevenson
... limitless miles of unfenced hills. She liked to turn off the road and gallop across the trackless ways, sometimes frightening rabbits and coyotes from the sagebrush. Several times she had startled antelope, and once her horse had shied at a rattlesnake coiled in the sunshine. The Indians she had learned to look upon as children. She had visited the cabins and lodges of some of those who lived near the ranch, and was not long in winning the esteem of the women who were finding the middle ground, between ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... traveled in a sunlit sea of space, under a sky of blue, in which tenuous cloud lakes floated. Once they came on a small bunch of hill cattle which went flying like deer into the covert of a draw. A rattlesnake above a prairie dog's hole slid into the mesquit. A swift watched them from the top of a smooth rock, motionless so long as they could see. She loved it all, this immense, deserted world of space filled with ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... was not in great danger for generally the little reptiles are tame indoors, but out of doors in the sunshine they become cross and ugly and their bite is more dangerous than that of a rattlesnake. ...
— Little Tales of The Desert • Ethel Twycross Foster
... stated that they were characterized by "simplicity, purity, and natural grace."[2] The other noted Negro of North Carolina was mentioned in 1799 by Buchan in his Domestic Medicine as the discoverer of a remedy for the bite of the rattlesnake. Buchan learned from Dr. Brooks that, in view of the benefits resulting from the discovery of this slave, the General Assembly of North Carolina purchased his freedom and settled upon him a hundred pounds ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... nature gave the natives teeth, was it not that they could pull out the upper and lower incisors, file them in points, and curve them in sharp fangs like the fangs of a rattlesnake? If she has placed nails at the end of the fingers, is it not that they may grow so immoderately that the use of the hand is rendered almost impossible? If the skin, black or brown, covers the human frame, is it ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... Jones and Plummer trail there were no wire fences, and the sullen farmer had not yet arrived. Your cowboy at that time was a person of thrill and consequence. He wore a broad-brimmed Stetson hat, and all about it a rattlesnake skin by way of band, retaining head and rattles. This was to be potent against headaches—a malady, by the way, which swept down no cowboy save in hours emergent of a spree. In such case the snake cure didn't cure. The hat was retained in defiance of winds, by a leathern cord ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... the animals in this region were very tame, for they had not learned to fear men. Yet among them the explorers found some dangerous enemies. One was the grizzly bear, and another the rattlesnake. But the greatest scourges of all were the tiny, buzzing mosquitoes, which ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... galinazo vulture,* (* Vultur aura, Linn., Zamuro, or Galinazo: the Brazilian vulture of Buffon. I cannot reconcile myself to the adoption of names, which designate, as belonging to a single country, animals common to a whole continent.) the crocodile, the viper, and the rattlesnake. The gaseous emanations, which are the vehicles of this aroma, seem to be evolved in proportion only as the mould, containing the spoils of an innumerable quantity of reptiles, worms, and insects, begins to be ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... of its native wood, Dashes damnation upon bad and good; The health of all the upas trees impairs By exhalations deadlier than theirs; Poisons the rattlesnake and warts the toad— The creeks go rotten and the rocks corrode! She shakes o'er breathless hill and shrinking dale The horrid aspergillus of her tail! From every saturated hair, till dry, The spargent fragrances ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... noticed the reclining figure casually, but thought no more about the man, though his interest might have been aroused if he had chanced to turn quickly for the desperado had raised his head with the quickness of a rattlesnake and his beady eye was fixed with malevolent intentness on ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... this and the neighbouring countries, are deer, panthers or tigers, bears, wolves, foxes, squirrels, racoons, and creatures called opossums, with an infinite variety of beautiful birds, and a diversity of serpents, among which the rattlesnake is the most remarkable. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... October is not too late to find this generous bloomer in pine woodlands, dry thickets, and sandy soil. Purplish-veined oval leaves, more or less hairy, that spread in a tuft next the ground, are probably as efficacious in curing shake bites as those of the Rattlesnake Plantain. When a credulous generation believed that the Creator had indicated with some sign on each plant the special use for which each was intended, many leaves were found to have veinings suggesting the marks on a snake's body; therefore, by simple reasoning, they must extract ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... gal, about so high, I was walkin' along Canal Street one day, barefeeted, an' not lookin' down, an' terrectly I feel some'h'n' nip me 'snip!' in de big toe, an' lookin' quick I see a grea' big rattlesnake—" ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... When at the farm, Huckelby, the overseer, kept his eye on Clotelle if within sight of her, for he knew she was a slave, and no doubt hoped that she might some day fall into his hands. But she shrank from his looks as she would have done from the charm of the rattlesnake. The negro-driver always tried to insinuate himself into the good opinion of Georgiana and the company that she brought. Knowing that Miss Wilson at heart hated slavery, he was ever trying to show that the slaves under his charge were happy and contented. ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... commissary supplied was no easy problem in the new settlement. Sometimes they ate boiled rattlesnake in default of anything better. On one occasion, while the little band of settlers was assembled in prayer in one of the log cabins, someone espied a bear swimming across the Cuyahoga River. The coming of the bear was looked upon as providential, ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... attracted the attention of the mother, who desired her husband to follow the child, and observe what she did with it. On coming to the child, he found her engaged in feeding several snakes, called yellow heads, a species of rattlesnake. He immediately took her away and proceeded to the house for his gun, and returning, killed two of them at one shot, and another a few days after. The child called these reptiles in the manner of calling chickens; and when her father observed, if she continued the practice they would ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... lunged into the room, his arm tensed to strike, the hand not open but clenched. One stroke of that bear's paw and Mulligan Jacobs and all the poisonous flame of him would have been quenched in the everlasting darkness. But he was unafraid. Like a cornered rat, like a rattlesnake on the trail, unflinching, sneering, snarling, he faced the irate giant. More than that. He even thrust his face forward on its twisted ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... of Nevada. On this mountain spur, between the Golconda miningcamp and Iron Point, is the only place I have seen him on the tour. He is a very interesting little creature, more lizard than frog, perfectly harmless; and his little bead-like eyes are bright and fascinating as the eyes of a rattlesnake. ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... crystals that formed on the cow trails and at the mountain gold camps. Cripple Creek became too effete for him, and an electric light in a tent became a target he could not resist; wherefore he went into the sage brush and the short grass, seeking others of his kind, the human rattlesnake, the ranging coyote and the outlawed wolf. Joe Nevison rode with the Dalton gang, raided ranches and robbed banks with the McWhorters and held up stages as a lone highwayman. At least, so men said in ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... the present city. He had offended Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War, by his irreverent wit, and was punished by exile to this then almost unknown region, which he called "Sandy Ague," chiefly inhabited by the flea, the horned toad, and the rattlesnake. Mr. Ames, of the Herald, a democratic paper, asked Derby, a stanch whig, to occupy the editorial chair during a brief absence. He did so, changing its politics at once, and furnishing funny articles which later appeared as "Phoenixiana," ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... Pecksniff," as the irreverent youngsters called him, the commander at Fort Emory on the outskirts of Gate City, telling of a tremendous storm that had swept the Laramie plains and the range of the Medicine Bow and Rattlesnake Hills, just after Lieutenant Dean had been sent forth with a small party of troopers to push through to Warrior Gap with a big sum of money, ten thousand dollars in cash, for the payment of contractors and their men at the new post, and, what was of thrilling import, there ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... what these magazine fellers write," went on the engineer, pensively, "the girl of to-day is a sort of mixture of bronc, ostrich, and rattlesnake thrown in. Smokes, drinks—say, Scotty, I wonder do ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... just as I was stretching out my hand to gather some of the delicious produce of that paradise of fruit and flowers, I heard the sound of a rattlesnake, that was preparing to make a spring, and immediately I saw the glistening eyes of a copper-head, which I had disturbed beneath the ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge
... the thickest covert I could find, and, shrouding myself as well as I was able, was soon overpowered by sleep. I did not awake till the sun had gained the meridian, and, creeping from my retreat, beheld, with some degree of terror, an enormous rattlesnake that was coiled up full in my way, and seemed determined to oppose my passage. This animal is frequent in the southern colonies, and is the most poisonous of all the reptiles that haunt the woods. He is in length from two to six feet, beautifully variegated ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... natural history specimens. I had a special order from a chap in New York for three hundred snakes—he wanted some big rattlers. I think I sent him some that pleased him; anyhow he paid for them all right. I had a customer who wanted a rattlesnake with a very big rattle, and I fixed up a snake for him on this trip and sent it to him afterwards. It had one hundred and eighteen rattles! I glued a lot of rattles together, and by taking off the buttons it was pretty ...
— Montezuma's Castle and Other Weird Tales • Charles B. Cory
... and whacking things generally. I naturally thought of a mouse, and not being afraid of them, I went on in and closed the door. I doubt if Mrs. Hunt saw me, she was so intently watching the man, who kept on upsetting things. He stopped finally, and then held up on the wood a snake—a dead rattlesnake! We measured it, and it was over ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... pious herself. She had a husband and three sons, who were sad characters, and she had often prayed for their conversion but to no effect. At last, one day while working in the corn-field, one of her sons was bitten by a rattlesnake. He had scarce reached home before he felt the poison, and in his agony called loudly on ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... used in this dance are treated from first to last with the utmost kindness and respect, especially the rattlesnakes, a dozen of which will frequently be squirming on the ground at once. It is noticeable that the Indians never pick up a rattlesnake when coiled, but always wait until it straightens itself out under the feather stroking, for it is claimed that the rattlesnake cannot strike uncoiled. At all events, when one is at its full length, the Indians not only ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... catch their flash when it has been a myriad of years on its way. For that Supreme One is not a God of pity or mercy—not as we recognize these qualities. Think of a God of mercy who would create the typhus germ, or the house-fly, or the centipede, or the rattlesnake, yet these are all His handiwork. They are a part of the Infinite plan. The minister is careful to explain that all these tribulations are sent for a good purpose; but he hires a doctor to destroy the fever germ, and he kills the rattlesnake when ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... coyotes, the dogs sometimes made prizes of rabbits and hares, which are plentiful here, and numbers of which we often shot for our dinners. Among the other animals there was a reptile I was not so much disposed to find amusement from, the rattlesnake. These snakes are very abundant here, especially during the spring of the year. The latter part of the time that I was on shore, I did not meet with so many, but for the first two months we seldom went ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... may fall into the hands of those who cannot speedily obtain a physician, it is worth while to mention what is best to be done for the bite of a rattlesnake:—Cut the flesh out, around the bite, instantly; that the poison may not have time to circulate in the blood. If caustic is at hand, put it upon the raw flesh; if not, the next best thing is to fill the wound with salt—renewing ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... appears to vary in color and markings in the different localities where it is found, and there are fourteen or fifteen varieties, but all carry the rattles, shake them warningly, and coil before they strike. The rattlesnake does not want to fight and if you keep at a safe distance it will glide off in another direction, but it is safest not to venture within striking distance, which is said to be two-thirds the length of the snake, even if the snake ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... could ride, forced her burro past Noddy while the latter was making a slight detour about a sage-brush. She turned partly around to laugh at Polly, when her burro made a sudden lunge away from the trail, and at the same time, a diamond- backed rattlesnake struck out from its coil, reaching at least two- thirds the full length of ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... happen at any time to be at a stand, and any man else begins to speak, he presently drowns him with his noise, as a water-dog makes a duck dive; for when you think he has done he falls on and lets fly again, like a gun that will discharge nine times with one loading. He is a rattlesnake, that with his noise gives men warning to avoid him, otherwise he will make them wish they had. He is, like a bell, good for nothing but to make a noise. He is like common fame, that speaks most and knows ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... or sweat or smoke de reason. Dat ain't de reason. Dey a old, old, slowfooted somethin' from Louisiana and dey say he de conjure man, one dem old hoodoo niggers. He git mad at me de last plum-ripenin' time and he make up powdered rattlesnake dust and pass dat through my hair and I sho' ain't ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... finally resented it openly. After that he didn't last long. They made it so unpleasant that he quit the service—crowded him out, that's all. He was a born soldier, too, and didn't know nothing else nor care for nothing else; as fine a man as I ever served under, but it soured him so that a rattlesnake couldn't have lived with him. He tried to go into some kind of business after he quit the army, but he wasn't cut out for it, and never made good as long as I knew of him. The last time I seen him was down on the border, and he had sure grown cultus. He had quit the squaw, who was livin' ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... question, which appeared to her very foolish. They asked the priest, but he could not tell them; but he said he supposed the light came from the eyes of some great wolf. The boys asked the king tortoise, who sulkily drew his head into his shell, and made no answer. When they asked the chief rattlesnake, he answered that he knew, and would tell them all about it if they would promise to make peace with his tribe, and on no account kill one of his descendants. The boys promised, and the chief rattlesnake then told them that there was a world above them, a beautiful world, peopled by creatures ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends: North American Indian • Anonymous
... and Jim and George Girty, his brothers, are p'isin rattlesnake Injuns. Simon Girty's bad enough; but Jim's the wust. He's now wusser'n a full-blooded Delaware. He's all the time on the lookout to capture white wimen to take to his Injun teepee. Simon Girty and his pals, McKee and Elliott, deserted ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... the light increased, and we could use our glasses with effect, we found too certainly that there was. The smuggler was painted so as to resemble the Viper; and Sir Morgan had taken her for that vessel on the night before: but we now suspected (and the event proved) that she was her partner, the Rattlesnake—a ship of much greater force with a piratical crew from the South Seas, and strengthened by some of the picked hands from the Viper. She had come round expressly on this service from the West coast of Ireland, where she had been hovering for some time back. The officer, ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... very atmosphere is compassion and magnanimity towards the poor and weak, are now uttering sentiments that four years ago would have been astounding beyond compare. These men feel that there is no longer any room in the world for the German. Society has organized itself against the rattlesnake and the yellow fever. Shepherds have entered into a conspiracy to exterminate the wolves. The Boards of Health are planning to wipe out typhoid, cholera and the Black Plague. Not otherwise, lovers of their ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... done what I did do. I killed Jess Tatum with my own hands, and I have never regretted it. I would not regard killing him as a crime any more than you gentlemen here would regard it as a crime killing a rattlesnake or a moccasin snake. Only, until now, I did not think it advisable for me to admit it; which, on Dudley Stackpole's account solely, is the only reason why I am now ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... fair warning, but she felt about as grateful as a wayfarer feels to the rattlesnake that whizzes "Make ...
— Mrs. Budlong's Chrismas Presents • Rupert Hughes
... if a rattlesnake had buzzed at his back, the second leaped to his feet with an oath; they stared in the direction whence the ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... our feet, and my first idea, an absurd one enough, was that a rattlesnake was hurrying through the grass to ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... whir rose a few feet to one side of the path and, very carefully, the boy climbed a fallen trunk and edged his way, very carefully, toward the sound: and there, by a dead limb and with his ugly head reared three inches above his coil of springs, was a rattlesnake. The sudden hate in the boy's face was curious—it was instinctive, primitive, deadly. He must shoot off-hand now and he looked down the long barrel, shaded with tin, until the sight caught on one of the beady, unblinking eyes and pulled the trigger. Jack leaped with the sound, in spite of Chad's ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... proceed, and at the first step a rattlesnake rears up at her, hissing and springing its rattles. She recoils in fear, but remembering the cowardly nature of the creatures, throws sticks at it, and ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... himself famous as a bon vivant and gourmet. Indeed, even yet, in turning old pages we come upon records of his dinners. Bartram, the Philadelphia botanist, whom the Muscogee Indians quaintly called Puc-Puggy (the Flower Hunter) details the great size of a rattlesnake, "six feet long and as thick as the leg of an ordinary man" which he chanced to kill in his bosky researches near Fort Picolata in Florida, and not the least surprising feature of the incident was a message from the commandant inviting both combatants ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... herbs found in Loudoun are the rattlesnake root, Seneca snakeroot (also called Virginia snakeroot), many varieties of mint, liverwort, red-root, May apple, butterfly-weed, milk weed, thorough-stem, trumpet-weed, Indian-physic, lobelia inflata, and lobelia ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... is also a moral and instructive prophet. John Bull is asleep, or rather in a vision; the cunning demon, Speculation, blowing a thousand bright bubbles about him. Meanwhile the rooks are busy at his fob, a knave has cut a cruel hole in his pocket, a rattlesnake has coiled safe round his feet, and will in a trice swallow Bull, chair, money and all; the rats are at his corn-bags (as if, poor devil, he had corn to spare); his faithful dog is bolting his leg-of-mutton—nay, a thief has gotten hold ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... inoculation to which you will be exposed, by a dilute solution of itself, and supply it only with what it particularly dislikes. For an already established tubercle requiring rapid action of the blood, such as may well exist among the birds and vertebrates of Jupiter and Saturn, I suggest a hypodermic rattlesnake injection, while hydrocyanic acid and tarantula saliva may also come in well. The combinations that so long destroyed us have already become our panacea." "I see you have these poisons at your fingers' ends," said Ayrault, "and we shall feel the ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... smiling. He knew that the old man had no sentiments beyond egotism, and a family pride which mainly, if not entirely, sprang from it. Such a heart as Garcia's, what a place to nestle in! Such a creature as Coronado seeking comfort in such a breast as his uncle's was very much like a rattlesnake warming himself in a ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... truth could be lost, and being answered in the negative, he replied, "Then I am safe." Now, it is not agreeable to be constantly on the watch-tower looking out for the foe, or to have to tread cautiously among the grass lest you should be bitten by a rattlesnake. But a man may imagine himself to be secure when he is not. Many of the shareholders and trustees involved in the late Bank catastrophy thought they were secure; but they slept upon a slumbering volcano, and ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... head and ears, in the marshes on the other side, where they all miserably perished to a man; and their bones being collected and decently covered by the Tammany Society of that day, formed that singular mound called Rattlesnake Hill, which rises out of the center of the salt marshes a little to the east of ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... said, after a careful examination of the little white thing. 'Not a rattleSNAKE, you know,' she added hastily, thinking that he was frightened: 'only an old ...
— Through the Looking-Glass • Charles Dodgson, AKA Lewis Carroll
... granite ridge, some two hundred feet in length, irregular in formation and height, resembling a huge molehill, extending down from the Rocky Mountain heights and being across the river's course; the "Gate" being a vertical section, the width of the stream, cut out of a spur of Rattlesnake Mountain. If his Satanic majesty, whose name it bears, had charge of the construction, apparently he intended it only as a passage-way for the river, the cut being the exact width of the river as it flows ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
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