Leonidas looked.  It was indeed Mr. Burroughs; but he was evidently only taking a short cut towards the Ridge, where his men were working.  Leonidas had seen him take it before.  But it was the principal trail on the steep hillside, and they must eventually meet.  A man might evade it by scrambling through the brush to a lower and rougher trail; but a woman, never!  But an idea had seized Leonidas.  “I can stop him,” he said confidently to her.  “You just lie low here behind that rock till I come back.  He hasn’t seen you yet.”

She had barely time to draw back before Leonidas darted down the trail towards her husband.  Yet, in her intense curiosity, she leaned out the next moment to watch him.  He paused at last, not far from the approaching figure, and seemed to kneel down on the trail.  What was he doing?  Her husband was still slowly advancing.  Suddenly he stopped.  At the same moment she heard their two voices in excited parley, and then, to her amazement, she saw her husband scramble hurriedly down the trail to the lower level, and with an occasional backward glance, hasten away until he had passed beyond her view.

She could scarcely realize her narrow escape when Leonidas stood by her side.  “How did you do it?” she said eagerly.

“With a rattler!” said the boy gravely.

“With a what?”

“A rattlesnake—­pizen snake, you know.”

“A rattlesnake?” she said, staring at Leonidas with a quick snatching away of her skirts.

The boy, who seemed to have forgotten her in his other abstraction of adventure, now turned quickly, with devoted eyes and a reassuring smile.

“Yes; but I wouldn’t let him hurt you,” he said gently.

“But what did you do?”

He looked at her curiously.  “You won’t be frightened if I show you?” he said doubtfully.  “There’s nothin’ to be afeerd of s’long as you’re with me,” he added proudly.

“Yes—­that is”—­she stammered, and then, her curiosity getting the better of her fear, she added in a whisper:  “Show me quick!”

He led the way up the narrow trail until he stopped where he had knelt before.  It was a narrow, sunny ledge of rock, scarcely wide enough for a single person to pass.  He silently pointed to a cleft in the rock, and kneeling down again, began to whistle in a soft, fluttering way.  There was a moment of suspense, and then she was conscious of an awful gliding something,—­a movement so measured yet so exquisitely graceful that she stood enthralled.  A narrow, flattened, expressionless head was followed by a footlong strip of yellow-barred scales; then there was a pause, and the head turned, in a beautifully symmetrical half-circle, towards the whistler.  The whistling ceased; the snake, with half its body out of the cleft, remained poised in air as if stiffened to stone.

“There,” said Leonidas quietly, “that’s what Mr. Burroughs saw, and that’s why he scooted off the trail.  I just called out William Henry,—­I call him William Henry, and he knows his name,—­and then I sang out to Mr. Burroughs what was up; and it was lucky I did, for the next moment he’d have been on top of him and have been struck, for rattlers don’t give way to any one.”