SNAKE ROOT
to be sure, but there were rattlers everywhere. A Pecos boy had been bitten on the ankle some years ago, and had come to him for whisky; he swelled up and was very sick, like any other boy.
The Bishop asked Orchard if he thought it probable that the Indians kept a great serpent in concealment somewhere, as was commonly reported.
“They do keep some sort of varmint out in the mountain, that they bring in for their religious ceremonies,” the trader said. “But I don’t know if it’s a snake or not. No white man knows anything about Indian religion, Padre.”
As they talked further, Orchard admitted that when he was a boy he had been very curious about these snake stories himself, and once, at their festival time, he had spied on the Pecos men, though that was not a very safe thing to do. He had lain in ambush for two nights on the mountain, and he saw a party of Indians bringing in a chest by torchlight. It was about the size of a woman’s trunk, and it was heavy enough to bend the young aspen poles on which it was hung. “If I’d seen white men bringing in a chest after dark,” he observed, “I could have made a guess at what was in it; money, or whisky, or fire-arms. But seeing it was Indians, I can’t say. It might have been only queer-shaped rocks their ancestors had taken a notion to. The things they value most are worth nothing to us. They’ve
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