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We made the adobes, which we used to construct the partitions of our house. These and the rock walls we plastered with mud, Bolly mixed the mud in a wheel barrow, rolled it into the house and threw it on the walls by the handful while I smoothed it on with a trowel. The floors we also made of mud. We smoothed them over. Allowed them to dry and then covered them with scraps of old rugs and congoleum. This house was built at a total cost of about $65.00.
There were several small but nevertheless outstanding incidents which took place during the remainder of our life on the homestead, and which made our life more interesting.
There was lots of wild life in this rough, rugged country, including coyotes, antelope, rattlesnakes, porcupines and owls, etc. One night after dark I had stepped out of the house for something and heard a “whoo-whoo,” and before I realized just what it was I said. “What?” Bolly had a big laugh at my expense over that, for it was only an old hoot owl.
The coyotes howled almost every night but we liked to hear them. They didn’t sound lonesome to us as they do to most people. But we didn’t like to have them come nearly up to the house and steal our chickens from practically right under our noses, as they did several times. More than once Bolly got up out of bed about daylight, when the chickens were just getting up, and took a shot at one or two coyotes. But he never did kill one of them because by the time he would be awake enough to see to shoot, they would be out of gun range.
Every summer we moved our bed out of doors. We loved to sleep beneath the stars and breath the fresh cool air. It was so far from civilization that we didn’t have to worry about privacy.
One night we had just been in bed about an hour when we heard a rattlesnake. Never before nor since have I heard a rattlesnake rattle any louder. It sounded as though it was right under the bed and it was several minutes before we got up enough courage to investigate. We lay still and listened to it long enough to make out from which direction the noise was coming. We both got up and followed the noise and found the snake down near the garden in a big clump of brush. We had a dog and this dog had disturbed the snake, causing it to rattle at that time of night.
I ran back to the house, lit the lamp and threw an overcoat over my head and holding it around the lamp to shield it from the wind, I went back and held the lamp so Bolly could locate the snake before it located him. When he saw it he was surprised to find that it was such a large one. He had killed lots of rattlesnakes on the place but none as large as this one.
We thought it would be a novel idea to capture it alive and take it to town as we were going to Roswell the next day. So he built several bonfires, surrounding the snake so we could keep it in sight and also keep it from crawling away, I wasn’t having much success with my lamp in the wind, anyway.
We got a washtub and a garden hoe and with the use of the hoe we dragged the snake under the tub where we left him until morning. Then we dumped him from the tub into a small glass enclosed case.
We were going to town with Bolly’s uncle in his truck so I got in the cab with he and his wife and Bolly rode on the back of the truck and held the case. There was some rough, rocky