I am not exactly a leaping rainbow trout and shuddered at the prospect, until I learned that the invaluable Monte would double for me again. But when the available mountain torrents came to be canvassed all were found to be dry. Mr. Walsh might incur a fractured skull, but he must give up all hope of a watery grave. With traditional resourcefulness I summoned up from my exhaustless store of classic lore the demise à la Cleopatra.
"Don't fake it with the harmless and invaluable gopher snake, which happens to be protected by law," I counseled, with an artistic integrity born of the knowledge that it was Walsh who was to be the serpent's playmate, "but get a snake with a punch. California won't miss one rattler more or less."
Dillon sent off to a Los Angeles dealer for eight dollars' worth of snake and got for his money a kindly old gentleman reptile with eight rattles and a button, whose altruism had been enhanced by the lancing of his poison ducts. Emmett Rice, an extraordinary character in charge of the zoo on the lot, whose easy and utter dominance over all his charges was uncanny, appeared with the reptile wrapped around his arm, laid it on the sand, coiled it with a finger,
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