Place, for the most part, lay on hillside[Pg 61] and plateau, free from poisonous snakes of all kinds, and usually free from mosquitoes as well. The lawn, close-shaven, sloped down to the lake. To one side of it, in a narrow stretch of bottom-land, a row of weeping willows pierced the loose stone lake-wall.Here, the ground was seldom bone-dry. Here, the grass grew rankest. Here, also, driven to water by the drought, abode eft, lizard and
an occasional snake, finding coolness and moisture in the long grass, and a thousand hiding places amid the stone-crannies or the
lake-wall.
If either the Mistress or the Master had been at home on this morning, the guest would have been warned against taking Baby there at all. She would have been doubly warned against the folly which she now proceeded to commit--of lifting the child from the wheelchair, and placing her on a spread rug in the grass, with her back to the low wall.
The rug, on its mattress of lush grasses, was soft. The lake breeze stirred the lower boughs of the willows. The air was pleasantly cool here, and had lost the dead hotness that brooded over the higher ground.
The guest was well pleased with her choice of a resting place. Lad was not.
The big dog had been growingly uneasy from the time the wheelchair approached the lake-wall. Twice he put himself in front of it; only to be[Pg 62] ordered aside. Once the wheels hit his ribs with jarring impact. As Baby was laid upon her grassy bed, Lad barked loudly and pulled at one end of the rug with his teeth.
The guest shook her parasol at him and ordered him back to the house. Lad obeyed no orders, save those of his two deities. Instead of slinking away, he sat down beside the child; so close to her that his ruff pressed against her shoulder. He did not lie down as usual, but sat--tulip ears erect, dark eyes cloudy with trouble; head turning slowly from side to side, nostrils pulsing.
To a human, there was nothing to see or hear or smell--other than the cool beauty of the nook, the soughing of the breeze in the willows, the soft fragrance of a June morning. To a dog, there were faint rustling sounds that were not made by the breeze. There were equally faint and elusive scents that the human nose could not register. Notably, a subtle odor as of crushed cucumbers. (If ever you have killed a pit-viper, you know that smell.)
The dog was worried. He was uneasy. His uneasiness would not let him sit still. It made him fidget and shift his position; and, once
or twice, growl a little under his breath.
Presently, his eyes brightened, and his brush began to thud gently on the rug-edge. For, a quarter mile above, The Place's car was turning in from the highway. In it were the Mistress and the Master, coming home with the mail. Now[Pg 63] everything would be all right. And the onerous duties of guardianship would pass to more capable hands.
As the car rounded the corner of the house and came to a stop at the front door, the guest caught sight of it. Jumping up from her seat on the rug, she started toward it in quest of mail. So hastily did she rise that she dislodged one of the wall's small stones and sent it rattling down into a wide crevice between two larger rocks.
She did not heed the tinkle of stone on stone; nor a sharp little hiss that followed, as the falling missile smote the coils of a sleeping copperhead snake in one of the wall's lowest cavities. But Lad heard it. And he heard the slithering of scales against rocksides, as the snake angrily sought new sleeping quarters.
The guest walked away, all ignorant of what she had done. And, before she had taken three steps, a triangular grayish-ruddy head was pushed out from the bottom of the wall.
Twistingly, the copperhead glided out onto the grass at the very edge of the rug. The snake was short, and thick, and dirty, with a distinct and intricate pattern interwoven on its rough upper body. The head was short, flat, wedge-shaped. Between eye and nostril, on either side, was the sinister "pinhole," that is the infallible mark of the poison-sac serpent.
(The rattlesnake swarms among some of the[Pg 64] stony mountains of the North Jersey hinterland; though seldom, nowadays, does it venture into the valleys. But the copperhead--twin brother in murder to the rattler--still infests meadow and lakeside. Smaller, fat-ter, deadlier than the diamond-back, it gives none of the warning which redeems the latter from complete abhorrence. It is a creature as evil as its own aspect--and name. Copperhead and rattlesnake are the only pit-vipers left now between Canada and Virginia.)
Out from its wall-cranny oozed the reptile. Along the fringe of the rug it moved for a foot or two; then paused uncertain--perhaps
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momentarily dazzled by the light. It stopped within a yard of the child's wizened little hand that rested idle on the rug. Baby's other arm was around Lad, and her body was between him and the snake.
Lad, with a shiver, freed himself from the frail embrace and got nervously to his feet.
There are two things--and perhaps only two things--of which the best type of thoroughbred collie is abjectly afraid and from
which he will run for his life. One is a mad dog. The other is a poisonous snake. Instinct, and the horror of death, warn him violently away from both.
At stronger scent, and then at sight of the copperhead, Lad's stout heart failed him. Gallantly had he attacked human marauders who had invaded The Place. More than once, in dashing fearlessness, he had fought with dogs larger than himself.[Pg 65] With a d'Artagnan-like gaiety of zest, he had tackled and deflected a bull that had charged head down at the Mistress.
Commonly speaking, he knew no fear. Yet now he was afraid; tremulously, quakingly, sickly afraid. Afraid of the deadly thing that was halting within three feet of him, with only the Baby's fragile body as a barrier between.
Left to himself, he would have taken, incontinently, to his heels. With the lower animal's instinctive appeal to a human in moments of danger, he even pressed closer to the helpless child at his side, as if seeking the protection of her humanness. A great wave of cowardice shook the dog from foot to head.
The Master had alighted from the car; and was coming down the hill, toward his guest, with several letters in his hand. Lad cast a yearning look at him. But the Master, he knew, was too far away to be summoned in time by even the most imperious bark.
And it was then that the child's straying gaze fell on the snake.
With a gasp and a shudder, Baby shrank back against Lad. At least, the upper half of her body moved away from the peril. Her legs and feet lay inert. The motion jerked the rug's fringe an inch or two, disturbing the copperhead. The snake coiled, and drew back its three-cornered head, the forklike maroon tongue playing fitfully.
[Pg 66]
With a cry of panic-fright at her own impotence to escape, the child caught up a picture book from the rug beside her, and flung it at the serpent. The fluttering book missed its mark. But it served its purpose by giving the copperhead reason to believe itself attacked.
Back went the triangular head, farther than ever; and then flashed forward. The double move was made in the minutest fraction of a
second.
A full third of the squat reddish body going with the blow, the copperhead struck. It struck for the thin knee, not ten inches away from its own coiled body. The child screamed again in mortal terror.
Before the scream could leave the fear-chalked lips, Baby was knocked flat by a mighty and hairy shape that lunged across her toward
