Chapter 9. The Snake

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_ CHAPTER IX. THE SNAKE

Early in the afternoon, having nothing else to do, Isobel again saddled up and started off towards Dry Fork. Her intention was to ride out on the road to Stockchute and meet Ashton, if he was not too late.

As she rode up one side of the divide, a hat appeared over the bend of the other side. She could not mistake the high peak of that comic opera sombrero. Ashton was almost back to the ranch. Her first thought was that he had gone part way, and given up the trip. The big sombrero bobbed up and down in an odd manner. She guessed the cause even before Ashton's head and body appeared, rising and falling rhythmically. She stared as Rocket swept up into view, covering the ground with a long-strided trot.

Ashton waved to her. She waved back. A few moments later they were close together. As she spun her pony around, he pulled in his horse to a walk, patting the beast's neck and speaking to him caressingly.

"Back already?" she asked. "Surely, you've not been to Stockchute--Yes, you have!" Her experienced eye was taking in every indication of his horse's condition. "He's been traveling; but you've handled him well."

"He's grand!" said Ashton. "Been putting him through his paces. I suppose he is your father's best mount."

"Daddy and Kid ride him when they're in a hurry or there's no other horse handy."

"You can't mean--? Then perhaps I can have him again occasionally."

"You like him, really?"

"All he needs is a little management," replied Ashton, again patting the horse's lean neck.

"If you wish to take him in hand, I'll assign him to you. No one else wants him."

"As your rural deliveryman's mount--" began Ashton. He stopped to show the bulging bag slung under his arm. "Here's the mail. Do you wish your letters now?"

"Thank you, no."

"Here is this, however," he said, handing her a folded slip of paper.

She opened it and looked at the writing inside. It was a receipt from the postmaster at Stockchute to Lafayette Ashton for certain letters delivered for mailing. The address of the letter to Thomas Blake was given in full. The girl colored, bit her lip, and murmured contritely: "You have turned the tables on me. I deserved it!"

"Please don't take it that way!" he begged. "My purpose was merely to assure you the letter was mailed. After all, I am a stranger, Miss Knowles."

"No, not now," she differed.

"It's very kind of you to say it! Yet it's just as well for me to start off with no doubts in your mind, in view of the fact that in two or three weeks--"

"Yes?" she asked, as he hesitated.

"I--Your father will hardly keep me more than two weeks, unless--unless I make good," he answered.

"I guess you needn't worry about that," she replied, somewhat ambiguously.

He shrugged. "It is very good of you to say it, Miss Knowles. I know I shall fail. Can you expect anyone who has always lived within touch of millions, one who has spent more in four years at college than all this range is worth--He cut my allowance repeatedly, until it was only a beggarly twenty-five thousand."

"Twenty-five thousand dollars!" exclaimed Isobel. "You had all that to--to throw away in a single year?"

"He cut me down to it the last year--a mere bagatelle to what I had all the time I was at college and Tech.," replied Ashton, his eyes sparkling at the recollection. "He wished me to get in thick with the New Yorkers, the sons of the Wall Street leaders. He gave me leave to draw on him without limit. I did what he wished me to do,--I got in with the most exclusive set. Ah-h!--the way I made the dollars fly! Before I graduated I was the acknowledged leader. What's more, I led my class, too--when I chose."

"When you chose!" she echoed. "And now what are you going to do?"

The question punctured his reminiscent elation. He sagged down in his saddle. "I don't know," he answered despondently. "Mon Dieu! To come down to this--a common laborer for wages--after that! When I think of it--when I think of it!"

"You are not to think of it again!" she commanded with kindly severity. "What you are to remember all the time is that you are now a man and honestly earning your own living, and no longer a--a leech battening on the sustenance produced by others."

He winced. "Was that my fault?"

"No, it was your father's. I marvel that he did not utterly ruin you."

"He has! In his last will he cuts me off with only a dollar."

"So that was it?--And you think that ruined you? I say it saved you!" she went on with the same kindly severity. "You were a parasite. Now the chance is yours to prove that you have the makings of a man. You have started to prove it. You shall not stop proving it. You are not going to be a quitter."

"No!" he declared, straightening under her bright gaze. "I will not quit. I will try my best to make good as long as the chance is given me."

"Now you're talking!" she commended him breezily.

"How could I do otherwise when you asked me?" he replied with a grave sincerity far more complimentary than mere gallantry.

She colored with pleasure and began to tell him of the cattle and their ways.

When they reached the corral she complimented him in turn by allowing him to offsaddle her horse. They walked on down to the house and seated themselves in the porch. As he opened the bag of mail for her she noticed that her hand was empty and turned to look back towards the corral.

"Your receipt from the postmaster," she remarked; "I must have dropped it."

He sprang up. "If you wish to keep it, I shall go back and find it for you."

"No, oh, no; unless you want it yourself," she replied.

"Not I. The matter is closed, thanks to your kindness," he declared, again seating himself.

He was right, in so far as they were concerned. Yet the matter was not closed. That evening, when Knowles and Gowan returned from their day of range riding, the younger man noticed a crumpled slip of paper lying against the foot of the corral post below the place where he tossed up his saddle. He picked it up and looked to see if it was of any value. An oath burst from his thin-drawn lips.

"Shut up, Kid!" remonstrated Knowles. "I'm no more squeamish than most, but you know I don't like any cussing so near Chuckie."

"Look at this!" cried Gowan--"Enough to make anybody cuss!"

He thrust out the slip of paper close before his employer's eyes. Knowles took it and read it through with deliberate care.

"Well?" he said. "It's a receipt from the postmaster to Ashton for those letters I sent over by him. What of it?"

"Your letters?" asked Gowan, taken aback. "Did you write that one what is most particularly mentioned, the one to that big engineer Blake?"

"No. What would I be doing, writing to him or any engineer? They're just the people I don't want to have any doings with."

"Then if you didn't write him, who did?" questioned Gowan, his mouth again tightening.

"Why, I reckon you'll have to do your own guessing, Kid--unless it might be Ashton did it."

"That's one leg roped," said Gowan. "Can you guess why he'd be writing to that engineer?"

"Lord, no. He may have the luck to know him. Mr. Blake is a mighty big man, judging from all accounts; but money stands for a lot in the cities and back East, and Ashton's father is one of the richest men in Chicago. I looked it up in the magazine that told about his helping to back the Zariba Dam project."

"That's another leg noosed--on the second throw," said Gowan. "Another try or two, and we'll have the skunk ready for hog-tying."

"How's that?" exclaimed the cowman. "You've got something up your sleeve."

"No, it's that striped skunk that's doing the crooked playing," snapped Gowan. "Can't you savvy his game? It's all a frame-up--his sending off his guide and outfit, so's to let on to you he'd been busted up and kicked out by his dad. You take him in to keep his pretty carcass from the coyotes--which has saved them from being poisoned."

"Now, look here, Kid, only trouble about you you're too apt to go off at half-cock. This young fellow may not be--"

"He shore is a snake, Mr. Knowles, and this receipt proves it on him," broke in the puncher. "Ain't you taken him into your employ?--ain't you treated him like he was a man?"

"Well, 'tisn't every busted millionaire would have asked for work, and he seems to mean it."

"Just a bluff! You don't savvy the game yet. Busted millionaire--bah! He's the coyote of that bunch of reclamation wolves. He comes out here to sneak around and get the lay of things. We happen to catch him rustling. To save his cussed carcass, he lets out about who his dad is. Course he couldn't know we'd got all the reports on that Zariba Dam and who backed the engineer, nor that we'd know all about Blake."

"Well?" asked Knowles, frowning.

"So he works us for suckers,--worms in here with us where he can learn all about you and your holdings; ropes a job with you, and gets off his report to that engineer Blake, first time he rides over to town."

"Is that all your argument?" asked Knowles.

"Ain't it enough?" rejoined Gowan. "Ain't he and that bunch all in cahoots together? Ain't this sneaking cuss's dad either the partner or the boss of Blake? Ain't Blake engaged in reclamation projects? You shore see all that. What follows?--It's all a frame-up, I tell you. Young Ashton comes out here as a sort of forerider for his concern; finds out what his people want to know, and now he's sent in his report to Blake. Next thing happens, Blake'll be turning up with a surveying outfit."

Knowles scratched his head. "Hum-m-m--You sure put up a mighty stiff argument, Kid. I'm not so sure, though.... Um-m-m--Strikes me some of your knots might be tighter. First place, there wasn't any play-acting about the way the boy went plumb to pieces there at the waterhole. Next place, a man like his father, that's piled up a mint of money, isn't going to send out his son as forerider in a hostile country. Lastly, I've read a lot more about that engineer Blake than you have, and I've sized him up as a man who won't do anything that isn't square and open."

"Maybe he ain't in on the dirty side of the deal," admitted Gowan. "How about this letter, though?"

"Just a friendly writing, like as not," answered the cowman. "No, Kid--only trouble with you is you're too anxious over the interests of Dry Mesa range. I appreciate it, boy, and so does Chuckie. But that's no reason for you to take every newcomer for a wolf 'til he proves he's only a dog."

"You won't do anything?" asked the puncher.

"What d'you want me to do?"

"Fire him--run him off Dry Mesa," snapped Gowan.

"Sorry I can't oblige you, Kid," replied Knowles. "You mean well, but you'll have to make a better showing before I'll turn adrift any man that seems to be trying to make good."

Gowan looked down. After a brief pause he replied with unexpected submissiveness: "All right, Mr. Knowles. You're the boss. Reckon you know best. I don't savvy these city folks."

"Glad you admit it," said Knowles. "You're all wrong in sizing him up that way. I've a notion he's got a lot of good in him, spite of his city rearing. I wouldn't object, though, if you wanted to test him out with a little harmless hazing, long as you didn't go too far."

"No," declined Gowan. "I've got my own notion of what he is. There's just one way to deal with skunks, and that is, don't fool with them."

The cowman accepted this as conclusive. But when, a little later, Ashton met Gowan at the supper table he was rendered uneasy by the cold glint in the puncher's gray eyes. As nothing was said about the postmaster's receipt, he could conjecture no reason for the look other than that Gowan was planning to render him ridiculous with some cowboy trick.

Isobel had assured him with utmost confidence that the testing of his horsemanship by means of Rocket had been intended only as a practical joke, and that Gowan would never have permitted him to mount the horse had he considered it at all dangerous. Yet the fellow might next undertake jokes containing no element of physical peril and consequently all the more humiliating unless evaded.

In apprehension of this, the tenderfoot lay awake most of that night and fully half of the next. His watch was fruitless. Each night Gowan and the other men left him strictly alone in his far dark corner of the bunkhouse. In the daytime the puncher was studiously polite to him during the few hours that he was not off on the range.

The third evening, after supper, Gowan handed Isobel the horny, half-flattened rattles of an unusually large rattlesnake.

"What is it? Do you wish me to guess his length?" she asked, evidently surprised that he should fetch her so commonplace an object. "I make it four feet."

"You're three inches short," he replied.

"Well, what about it?" she inquired.

"Nothing--only I just happened to get him up near the bunkhouse, Miss Chuckie. Thought I'd tell you, in case he has a mate around."

"We must all look sharp. You, too, Mr. Ashton. They are more apt to strike without warning, this time of year."

"I know," remarked Ashton. "It's before they cast their old skin, and it makes them blind."

"Too early for that," corrected Knowles. "I figure it's the long spell of the summer's heat. Gets on their nerves, same as with us."

"They shore are mighty like some humans," observed Gowan. "Look at the way they like to snuggle up in your blankets on a cool night. Remember how I used to carry a hair rope on spring round-up?"

"I remember that they used to crawl into the bunkhouse before the floor was laid," said Isobel. She smiled at Ashton. "That was the Dry Mesa reptilian age. I first learned to handle a 'gun' shooting at rattlers. There were so many we had to make it a rule to kill everyone we could. But there hasn't been one killed so near the house for years."

"They often go in pairs. This one, though, may have been a lone stray," added Gowan. He looked at his employer. "Talking about strays, guess I'd best go out in the morning and head back that Bar-Lazy-J bunch. I can take an iron along and brand those two calves, same trip."

Knowles nodded and returned to his Government report. The two young men and Isobel began an evening's entertainment at the piano. Ashton enjoyed himself immensely. Though so frank and unconstrained in manner, the girl was as truly refined as the most fastidiously reared ladies of the East.

At the end of the delightful evening he withdrew with Gowan to the bunkhouse, reluctant to leave, yet aglow with pleasure. Isobel had so charmed him that he lay in his bunk forgetful of all else than her limpid blue eyes and dimpled cheeks. But after his two nights of broken rest he could not long resist the heaviness that pressed together his eyelids. He fell asleep, smiling at the recollection of the girl's gracious, "Good-night and pleasant dreams!"

With such a kindly wish from her, his dreams certainly should have been heavenly. Yet he began the night by sinking into so profound a sleep that he had no dreams whatever. When at last he did rouse to the dream-state of consciousness, it was not to enjoy any pleasant fantasy of music and flowers.

He was lying in Deep Canyon, down at the very bottom of those gloomy depths. About him was an awful stillness. The river of the abyss was no longer roaring. It had risen up, up, up to the very rim of the precipices--and all the tremendous weight of its waters was above him, bearing down upon him, smothering him, crushing in his chest! He sought to shriek, and found himself dumb.

Suddenly an Indian stood over him, a gigantic Indian with feet set upon his breast. The red giant was a medicine man, for he clashed and rattled an enormous gourd full of bowlders.

The rattle sounded sharper, shriller, more vibrant in the ears of the rousing sleeper. His eyelids fluttered, rose a little way, and snapped wide apart. His eyes, bared of their covers, glared in utter horror of that which they saw. Their pupils dilated, their balls bulged as if about to burst from the sockets.

The weight was still on his chest,--a weight far more to be dreaded than a canyon full of water or the foot of an Indian Titan. It was a weight of living, quivering coils. Above those coils, clearly illuminated in the full daylight that streamed through the open door of the bunkhouse, there upreared a hideous gaping maw, set with four slender curved fangs of dazzling whiteness.

The snake's eyes, green as emeralds, glared down into the face of the man with such intense malignancy that they seemed to stream forth a cold evil light. Fortunately he was paralyzed with fright. The slightest movement would have caused that fanged maw to lash down into his face.

Something partly obscured the light in the doorway. Ashton was too terrified to heed. But the snake was more sensitive to the change in the light. Without altering the deadly poise of its head, it again sounded its shrill, menacing rattle. The shadow passed and the light streamed in as before. The rattling ceased. There followed a pause of a few seconds' duration--To the man every second was an age-long period of horror.

A faint metallic click came from across the room. Slight as was the sound, the irritated snake again set its rattle to quivering. The triangular head flattened back for the delayed stroke at the ashen face of the man. The billowing coils stiffened--the stroke started. In the same instant came a report that to the strained ears of the man sounded like the crashing roar of a cannon.

The head and forepart of the snake's body shot alongside his face, writhing in swift convulsions. The first touch of its cold scales against his cheek broke the spell of horror that had bound him. He jerked his head aside, and flung out his left hand to push the hideous thing from him. As his fingers thrust away the nearest coil, the head flipped around on its half-severed neck, and the deadly jaws automatically gaped and snapped together. Two of the dripping poison fangs struck in the cushion of flesh on the outer edge of Ashton's hand. With a shriek, he flung the dying snake on the floor and put the wounded hand to his mouth.

"He struck you!" cried the voice of Isobel, "but only on the hand, thank goodness! Wait, I'll fix it. Lie still."

She came swiftly across the room, thrusting a long-barreled automatic pistol into its holster under a fold of her skirt. Her other hand drew out a locket that was suspended in her bosom.

"Whiskey! I'm bitten!" panted Ashton, sucking frantically at his wounds. "Quick! I'm bitten. Give me whiskey!"

"Steady, steady," she reassured. "It's not bad--only on your hand. Give it to me. Here's something a thousand times better than whiskey--permanganate."

While speaking, she caught up his neckerchief from the head of the bunk and knotted it about the wrist of the wounded hand tightly enough to check the circulation.

"Now hold it steady," she directed. "Won't have to use a knife. You tore open the holes when you jerked off the horrid thing."

Obedient but still sweating with fear, he held up the bleeding hand. She had opened her locket, in which were a number of small, dark-purple crystals. Two of the larger ones she thrust lengthwise as deeply as she could into the little slits gashed by the fangs. Another large and two small crystals were all that she could force into the openings.

"There!" she cheerily exclaimed. "That will kill the poison in short order, and will not hurt you a particle. It's the best thing there is to cheat rattlers,--just cheap, ordinary permanganate of potash. If people only had sense enough always to carry a few crystals, no one would ever die of rattlesnake bites."

"I've--I've heard that whiskey--" began Ashton.

"Yes, and far more victims die from the whiskey than from the bites," rejoined Isobel.

"But a stimulant--"

"Stimulant, then heart depressant--first up, then down--that's alcohol. No, you'll get only one poison, the snake's, this time. So don't worry. You'll soon be all right. Even had you been struck in the face, quick action with permanganate would have saved you."

He shuddered. "Ah!... But if you had not come!"

"It was fortunate, wasn't it?" she remarked. "I did not know you were in here. I was going up to the corral and heard the rattle as I came past. It was so faint that I might not have noticed it, had not Kid told of killing the rattler yesterday."

Ashton stared fearfully at his blackening hand. Isobel smiled and began to unknot the neckerchief.

"There is nothing to fear," she insisted. "That is due only to lack of circulation. You'll soon be all right. Come up to the house as soon as you can and get two or three cups of coffee. I'll tell Yuki."

She hastened out. When he had made sure that the still writhing snake was far over on the floor, he slipped from his bunk and dressed as quickly as was possible without the use of his numbed hand. Shirt, trousers, boots--he stopped for no more, but hurried after Isobel. Whether because of the effects of the poison or merely as the reaction of the shock, he felt faint and dizzy. Several cups of hot strong coffee, however, went far towards restoring him. _

Read next: Chapter 10. Coming Events

Read previous: Chapter 8. A Man's Size Horse

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