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“‘How’s your wind, Bill? Is it comin’ easy?’

“‘Shore,’ it would seem like Bill answers. ‘Valves never is in sech shape. I’m on velvet; how’s your laigs standin’ the pace, Jim?’

“‘Laigs is workin’ like they’s new oiled,’ Jim replies back; ‘it’s a plumb easy game. I reckons, Bill, me an’ you could keep ahead of them mavericks a year if we-alls feels like it.’

“‘Bet a blue stack on it,’ Bill answers. ‘ I deems these yere gents soft. Before I’d ride sech ponies as them, I’d go projectin’ ’round some night an’ steal one.’

“‘Them ponies is shorely a heap slothful,’ Jim answers.

“‘At this mebby them Road Runners ruffles their feathers an’ runs on swifter, jest to show what a slow racket keepin’ ahead of me an’ Peets is. An’ these yere locoed birds keeps up sech conversations for hours.

“Mind I ain’t sayin’ that what I tells you is what them Road Runners really remarks; but I turns it over to you-all the way it strikes me an’ Doc at the time. What I aims to relate, how-ever, is an incident as sheds light on how wise an’ foxy Road Runners be.

“Doc Peets an’ me, as I states, ain’t lavishin’ no onreasonable notice on these yere birds, an’ they’ve been scatterin’ along the trail for mebby it’s an hour, when one of ’em comes to a plumb halt, sharp. The other stops likewise an’ rounds up ag’inst his mate; an’ bein’ cur’ous to note what’s pesterin ’em, Peets an’ me curbs to a stand-still. The Road Runner who stops first–the same bein’ Bill– is lookin’ sharp an’ interested-like over across the plains.

“‘Rattlesnake,’ he imparts to his side partner.

“‘Where’s he at?’ says the side partner, which is Jim, ‘where’s this yere snake at, Bill? I don’t note no rattlesnake.’

“‘Come round yere by me,’ Bill says. ‘Now on a line with the top of yonder mesa an’ a leetle to the left of that soap-weed; don’t you- all see him quiled up thar asleep?’

“‘Which I shorely does,’ says Jim, locatin’ the rattlesnake with his beady eye, ‘an’ he’s some sunk in slumber. Bill, that serpent is our meat.’

“‘Move your moccasins easy,’ says Bill, ‘so’s not to turn him out. Let’s rustle up some flat cactuses an’ corral him.’

“Tharupon these yere Road Runners turns in mighty diligent; an’ not makin’ no more noise than shadows, they goes pokin’ out on the plains ontil they finds a flat cactus which is dead; so they can tear off the leaves with their bills. Doc Peets an’ me sets in our saddles surveyin’ their play; an’ the way them Road Runners goes about the labors of their snake killin’ impresses us it ain’t the first bootchery of the kind they appears in. They shorely don’t need no soopervisin’.

“One after the other, Jim an’ Bill teeters up, all silent, with a flat cactus leaf in their beaks, an’ starts to fence in the rattlesnake with ’em. They builds a corral of cactus all about him, which the same is mebby six-foot across. Them engineerin’ feats takes Jim an’ Bill twenty minutes. But they completes ’em; an’ thar’s the rattlesnake, plumb surrounded.

“These yere cactuses, as you most likely saveys, is thorny no limit; an’ the spikes is that sharp, needles is futile to ’em. Jim an’ Bill knows the rattlesnake can’t cross this thorny corral.

“He don’t look it none, but from the way he plays his hand, I takes it a rattlesnake is sensitive an’ easy hurt onder the chin.

“An’ it’s plain to me an’ Peets them Road Runners is aware of said weaknesses of rattlesnakes, an’ is bankin’ their play tharon. We- alls figgers, lookin’ on, that Jim an’ Bill aims to put the rattlesnake in prison; leave him captive that a-way in a cactus calaboose. But we don’t size up Jim an’ Bill accurate at all. Them two fowls is shorely profound.

“No sooner is the corral made, than Jim an’ Bill, without a word of warnin’, opens up a warjig ’round the outside; flappin’ their pinions an’ screechin’ like squaws. Nacherally the rattlesnake wakes up. The sight of them two Road Runners, Jim an’ Bill, cussin’ an’ swearin’ at him, an’ carryin’ on that a-way scares him.