ee inches above
his coil of springs, was a rattlesnake. The sudden hate in the boy's
face was curious--it was instinctive, primitive, deadly. He must shoot
off-hand now and he looked down the long barrel, shaded with tin, until
the sight caught on one of the beady, unblinking eyes and pulled the
trigger. Jack leaped with the sound, in spite of Chad's yell of
warning, which was useless, for the ball had gone true and the poison
was set loose in the black, crushed head.

"Jack," said Chad, "we just GOT to go down now."

So they went on swiftly through the heat of the early afternoon. It was
very silent up there. Now and then, a brilliant blue-jay would lilt
from a stunted oak with the flute-like love-notes of spring; or a
lonely little brown fellow would hop with a low chirp from one bush to
another as though he had been lost up there for years and had grown
quite hopeless about seeing his kind again. When there was a gap in the
mountains, he could hear the querulous, senseless love-quarrel of
flickers going on below him; passing a deep ravine, the note of the
wood-thrush--that shy lyrist of the hills--might rise to him from a
dense covert of maple and beech: or, with a startling call, a
red-crested cock of the woods would beat his white-striped wings from
spur to spur, as though he were keeping close to the long swells of an
unseen sea. Several times, a pert flicker squatting like a knot to a
dead limb or the crimson plume of a cock of the woods, as plain as a
splash of blood on a wall of vivid green, tempted him to let loose his
last load, but he withstood them. A little later, he saw a fresh
bear-track near a spring below the head of a ravine; and, later still,
he heard the far-away barking of a hound and a deer leaped lightly into
an open sunny spot and stood with uplifted hoof and pointed ears. This
was too much and the boy's gun followed his heart to his throat, but
the buck sprang lightly into the bush and vanished noiselessly.

The sun had dropped midway between the zenith and the blue bulks
rolling westward and, at the next gap, a broader path ran through it
and down the mountain. This, Chad knew, led to a settlement and, with a
last look of choking farewell to his own world, he turned down. At
once, the sense of possible human companionship was curiously potent:
at once, the boy's half-wild manner changed and, though alert and still
watchful, he whistled cheerily to Jack, threw his gun over his
shoulder, and