"Gracious!" exclaimed Walter, as they pried the rest of the body from the sand with their gun barrels. "Did you ever see one like it in your life?"
"I never saw such a monster before, and I don't believe anyone else ever did," agreed McCarty, as he gazed down at the beautiful, diamond-marked body of the huge rattlesnake, for such it was.
Walter measured the body with his gun barrel, while McCarty counted the rattles at the tip of the tail.
"It's eight feet two inches long," Walter announced. "No one will ever believe that we killed a rattle of that size."
"Well, here is one way to convince them," said McCarty, as, with his knife he severed the rattles from the body. "They can't doubt that it was a whopper. Here's twenty-four rattles and a button, which shows that it was twenty-four years old."
"My, but I would like to get that skin off," Walter said, longingly. "It's a beauty, but I'm afraid to skin it."
"Yes, it would be risky," agreed McCarty, who, like his companion, was well versed as a hunter. "It may have bitten itself when the fire was going over it. But come, let's move on. The sport is only just beginning. Did you notice where that covey of quail settled?"
"Yes," Walter said, "they went down in that bunch of spruce over there. Bob is nosing them up already."
The lads followed up the sniffing dog, and out of the rise Walter got seven more birds. "That makes twenty," he observed. "That's enough for supper, and there is no use killing more than we can use. I've got some buckshot cartridges. Let's try and find some bigger game. You've had no fun at all, so far. I've been having it all. Which is the best way to go?"
"I don't really know," said McCarty. "I have never hunted far from camp out here, but, I fancy, straight ahead is as good as any. I climbed way up on the machine's boom the other day and took a good look over the country. Say, it's the craziest looking country you ever saw. It's a regular Chinese puzzle of stretches of prairie, ponds, bits of flat woods, hummocks, and even little hills rising up suddenly from the prairie. It's a queer country, all right. Looks as though there might be any kind of game in it. Hang it, there goes that fool, dog again. Won't he ever learn a lesson?"