Page:How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon.djvu/331

 wagon, but I was too tired to think much of it. The Doctor being up all the night before, was asleep in two minutes. I was dozing off, with rattlesnakes and all the horrors of the 297 past day running through my mind, when I was suddenly awakened by something pulling and working in my long, bushy hair. Barbers were not plentiful on the plains, and, besides, the plainsmen wear long hair as a protection. I suppose it was only a few minutes of suspense, and yet it seemed an hour, before I became wide awake, and reached at once the conclusion that I had poked my head near the log where his snakeship was sleeping, and the evening being cool, he was trying to secure warmer quarters. I knew it would not do to move my head. I quietly slipped my right arm from the blanket, and slowly moved my hand within six inches of my head. I felt the raking of a harder material, which seemed like a fang scraping the scalp. This made me almost frantic. Suddenly I grasped the offender by the head, jerking hair and all, and, jumping to my feet, yelled, so that every packer bounced to his feet, and seized his gun, thinking we were attacked by Indians. This is a round-about way to tell a snake story, but all the facts had to be recited to reveal the real conditions.

It was forty-five years ago, and the sensations of the time are vivid to this day; and it doesn't even matter that the offender was not a rattler,