something
supernatural on the stairway?

She saw the door tremble from the blows delivered upon it. There was
nothing spiritual about that.

"Whatever it is----"

To punctuate her observation Jessie Norwood lifted the iron latch and
jerked open the door. It was dusky in the stairway and she could not
see a thing. But almost instantly there tumbled out upon the kitchen
floor something that brought shriek after shriek from Jessie's lips.

"Hi!" cried Henrietta. "Did it bite you?"

Jessie did not stop to answer. She seized her skirt drying before the
fire and wrapped it around her bare shoulders as she ran through the
outer door. She left behind her writhing all over the kitchen floor a
pair of big blacksnakes.

The fighting snakes hissed and thumped about, wound about each other
like a braided rope. Probably the warmth of the fire passing up the
chimney had stirred the snakes up, and it was evident that they were
in no pleasant frame of mind.

"What is it? Ghosts?" cried Amy Drew, standing in the rain.

"It's worse! It's snakes!" Jessie declared, looking fearfully behind
her, and in at the door.

She had dropped the stick with which she had so valiantly faced the
unknown. But when that unknown had become known--and Jessie had always
been very much afraid of serpents--all the girl's valor seemed to have
evaporated.

"Mercy!" gasped Amy. "What's going on in there? Hear that thumping,
will you?"

"They are fighting, I guess," replied her chum.

"Where's Hen?"

"She's in there, too. She didn't stop eating."

At that Amy began laughing hysterically. "She can't eat the snakes,
can she?" she shrieked at last. "But maybe they'll eat her. How many
snakes are there, Jess?"

"Do you suppose I stopped to count them? Dozens, maybe. They came
pouring out of that dark stairway----"

"Where _is_ the child?" demanded Amy, who had come up upon the porch,
and was now peering in through the doorway.

The sounds from inside, like the beating of a flail, continued. Amy
craned her head around the door jamb to see.

"Goodness, mercy, child!" she shouted. "Look out what you are doing!
You will get bitten!"

The noise of the thrashing stopped. At least, the larger part of the
noise. Henrietta came to the door with the stick that Jessie had
dropped in her hand.

"I fixed 'em," she said calmly. "I just hate snakes. I always kill
them black ones. They ain't got no poison. And I shut the door so if
there's any more upstai