After the boys had eaten, as only boys can eat, they crawled through the vines and among the thorns of the overgrown plantation.  They found stalks of sugar-cane and bunches of bananas; wide-spreading guava and lime trees, loaded with fruit; and tall Avocado pear trees from which hung purpling globes of that great, creamy, most delicious fruit, commonly called alligator pear.  They filled with fruit the shirts they wore, till they bulged like St. Nicholas, and made many trips between the trees and their canoe.  As Dick was standing beside a lime tree, he heard a sound near him like the whirring of a big locust.  Dick had never before heard the angry jarring of the rattles of the great king of snakes, but he didn’t need to be told the meaning of the blood-curdling sound, which seemed to come from all directions at once.  He gazed about him for a moment, with every muscle tense, until he caught sight of the head of the reptile waving slowly to and fro above the irregular coils of his body.  The snake seemed to be within striking distance and the unnerved boy sprang suddenly away from it, landing among the thorn-bearing branches of a big lime tree.  Dick soon recovered his nerve, and hunting up a big stick, went cautiously in search of the reptile, which he found still coiled.  He broke the creature’s back with his first blow and had struck several more when Johnny came crawling through the undergrowth, and called out: 

“Want to save his skin?”

“Sure,” replied Dick, who hadn’t thought of it before.

“Then don’t smash him any more and I’ll show you how to round-skin him.  He’s dead enough, now.  A feller from New York showed me how.  He skinned ’em for a livin’.  Birds, too.  Said he’d give me ten dollars if I’d get him the skin of one of these fork-tailed kites.  He wanted the nest and eggs, too.  Say, but he could skin things.  Skin a bird without losin’ a feather or gettin’ a drop o’ blood on it.  Said the best way to skin snakes was ’fore they was dead.”

As Johnny began cutting the skin free from the jaws of the reptile, the long, needle-like fangs dripped yellow venom and Dick, looking on with a white face, half whispered: 

“Suppose you happened to touch those fangs?”

“Ain’t a-goin’ to touch ’em.  Wish I had my pliers here, to pull ’em out.  You oughter save ’em, and the skull, too.  The feller I was tellin’ yer about always did.”

“I don’t want them; makes me sick to look at them,” said Dick, who looked mightily relieved when, the head having been skinned, it was cut off and thrown into the bay.  After that he became interested and helped Johnny with his work until he held in his hand the beautiful skin of a diamondback rattlesnake, over six feet long.