shrieked Agnes again. “It’s a snake – a horrid, great, big snake!”
“Well, what under the sun did you make me stop for?” demanded the boy. “I’d have gone right over it.”
“That would have been cruel, boy,” declared Mrs. Heard, from behind.
“Cruel? Huh! It’s a rattler,” returned Neale.
“Oh, Neale! It’s never!” gasped Agnes, not meaning to be impolite.
“A rattler, Neale?” asked Ruth. “Are you sure?”
“What’s a rattler?” asked Dot, composedly. “Is it what they make baby’s rattles out of?”
“Mercy, no!” shivered Tess. “Neale means it’s a rattlesnake.”
“Oh! I don’t like them,” declared Dot, immediately picking up the Alice-doll, of which she always first thought in time of peril.
“What shall we do?” demanded Ruth.
“Can’t he drive around it?” asked Mrs. Heard, rather excitedly. “I don’t believe at all in hurting any dumb animal – not even a snake or a spider.”
“How about breaking the whip on old Jonas?” whispered Neale to Agnes.
But his girl friend was all of a shiver. “Do get around it, Neale,” she begged.
“Can’t. The road’s too narrow,” declared the boy, with promptness. “And I am bound to run over the thing if it doesn’t move out of the way. I can’t help it.”
“Wait!” cried Mrs. Heard. “Get out and poke it with a stick.”
“Why, Mrs. Heard!” exclaimed Ruth, “do you realize that a rattlesnake is deadly poison? I wouldn’t let Neale do such a thing.”
“Besides being a suffragist,” declared Mrs. Heard, firmly, “I am a professing and acting member of the S.P.C.A. I cannot look on and see a harmless beast – it is not doing anything to us – wantonly killed or injured.”
“Good-night!” murmured Neale.
Just then the snake – and it was a big fellow, all of six feet long – seemed to awaken. Perhaps it had been chilled by the coolness of the night before; it was lethargic, at any rate.
It lifted its head, whirled into the very middle of the road, and faced the automobile defiantly. In a moment it had coiled and sprung its rattle. The whirring sound, once heard, is never to be mistaken for any other.
“Oh, dear! what shall we do?” gasped Agnes. “If you try to run over it, it may get into the car – or something,” said Ruth.
The roadway was narrower here than it had been back where the brown pony had held the party up. This first trip in their automobile seemed to be fraught with much adventure for the Corner House girls and Neale O’Neil.
CHAPTER IV – SALERATUS JOE
Neale O’Neil knew very well that he could not satisfy everybody – least of all the rattlesnake.
Mrs. Heard did not want her S.P.C.A. sensibilities hurt; Agnes wanted him to drive on; Ruth wished him to dodge the coiled rattler. As for getting out and “coaxing it to move on” with a stick, Neale had no such intention.
He tried starting slowly to see if the serpent would be frightened and open the way for the passage of the car. But the rattler instantly coiled and sprang twice at the hood. The second time it sank its fangs into the left front tire.
“Cricky!” gasped Neale. “They say you swell all up when one of those things injects poison into you; but I don’t believe that tire will swell any more than it is.”
“Don’t make fun!” groaned Agnes. “Suppose it should jump into the car?”
“If we only had a gun,” began Neale.
“Well, I hope you haven’t, young man,” cried Mrs. Heard. “I’m deadly afraid of firearms.”
“Don’t get out of the car, Neale,” begged Agnes, clasping her hands.
“Try to back away from it,” suggested Ruth.
The smaller girls clung to each other (Dot determinedly to the Alice-doll, as well), and, although they did not say much, they were frightened. Tess whispered:
“Oh, dear me! I’m ‘fraid enough of the wriggling fish-worms that Sammy digs in our garden. And this snake is a hundred times as big!”
“And fish-worms don’t shoot people with their tongues, do they?” suggested Dot.
Just at that very moment, when the six-foot rattler had coiled to strike again, there was a rattling and jangling of tinware from up the road. There was a turn not far ahead, and the young folks could not see beyond it.
“Goodness me!” exploded Agnes, “what’s coming now?”
“Not another rattlesnake, I bet a cent – though it’s some rattling,” chuckled Neale O’Neil.
The heads of a pair of horses then appeared around the turn. They proved to be drawing a tin-peddler’s wagon, and over this rough piece of driveway the wash-boilers, dishpans, kettles, pails, and a dozen other articles of tin and agate-ware, were making more noise than the passage of a battery of artillery.
Some scientists have pointed out that snakes – some snakes, at least – seem to be hard of hearing. That could not have been so with the big rattlesnake that had held up the Kenways and their automobile.
Before the Jewish peddler on the seat of the wagon could draw his willing horses to a halt, the snake swiftly uncoiled and wriggled across the road and into the bushes. All that was left to mark his recent presence was a wavy mark in the dust.
“Vat’s the madder?” called the peddler. “Ain’t dere room to ged by?”
“Sure,” said the relieved Neale. “Let me back a little and you pull out to the right, and we’ll be all right. We were held up by a snake.”
The Jew (he was a little man with fiery hair and whiskers, and he had a narrow-brimmed derby hat jammed down upon his head), seemed to study over this answer of the boy for fully a minute. Then, as Neale was steering the automobile slowly past his rig, he leaned sidewise and asked, with a broad smile:
“I say, mister! Vat did you say stopped you?”
“A snake,” declared Neale, grinning.
“Oy, oy! And that it iss yedt to drive one of them so benzine carts? No! Mein horses iss petter. They are not afraid of snakes.”
He still sat, without starting his team, thinking the surprising matter over, when the automobile turned the curve in the road and struck better going.
“Well!” ejaculated Agnes, “I only hope he stays there till that snake comes out of the bushes again and climbs into his cart.”
“My! how disagreeable you can be,” returned Neale, laughing. “I don’t believe you’ll
