“Oh, why didn’t you let”—­She stopped herself quickly, but could not stop the fierce glint in her eye nor the sharp curve in her nostril.  Luckily, Leonidas did not see this, being preoccupied with his other graceful charmer, William Henry.

“But how did you know it was here?” said Mrs. Burroughs, recovering herself.

“Fetched him here,” said Leonidas briefly.

“What in your hands?” she said, drawing back.

“No! made him follow!  I have handled him, but it was after I’d first made him strike his pizen out upon a stick.  Ye know, after he strikes four times he ain’t got any pizen left.  Then ye kin do anythin’ with him, and he knows it.  He knows me, you bet!  I’ve bin three months trainin’ him.  Look!  Don’t be frightened,” he said, as Mrs. Burroughs drew hurriedly back; “see him mind me.  Now scoot home, William Henry.”

He accompanied the command with a slow, dominant movement of the hickory rod he was carrying.  The snake dropped its head, and slid noiselessly out of the cleft across the trail and down the hill.

“Thinks my rod is witch-hazel, which rattlers can’t abide,” continued Leonidas, dropping into a boy’s breathless abbreviated speech.  “Lives down your way—­just back of your farm.  Show ye some day.  Suns himself on a flat stone every day—­always cold—­never can get warm.  Eh?”

She had not spoken, but was gazing into space with a breathless rigidity of attitude and a fixed look in her eye, not unlike the motionless orbs of the reptile that had glided away.

“Does anybody else know you keep him?” she asked.

“Nary one.  I never showed him to anybody but you,” replied the boy.

“Don’t!  You must show me where he hides to-morrow,” she said, in her old laughing way.  “And now, Leon, I must go back to the house.”

“May I write to him—­to Jim Belcher, Mrs. Burroughs?” said the boy timidly.

“Certainly.  And come to me to-morrow with your letter—­I will have mine ready.  Good-by.”  She stopped and glanced at the trail.  “And you say that if that man had kept on, the snake would have bitten him?”

“Sure pop!—­if he’d trod on him—­as he was sure to.  The snake wouldn’t have known he didn’t mean it.  It’s only natural,” continued Leonidas, with glowing partisanship for the gentle and absent William Henry.  “You wouldn’t like to be trodden upon, Mrs. Burroughs!”

“No!  I’d strike out!” she said quickly.  She made a rapid motion forward with her low forehead and level head, leaving it rigid the next moment, so that it reminded him of the snake, and he laughed.  At which she laughed too, and tripped away.