“Oh! yes. But these are the first I have seen this spring,” answered Miss Joanna, cheerfully. “I am always glad for one reason to meet my first snake. I’m pretty sure of warm weather coming. These have just crawled out of their winter quarters, somewhere near, and have been sunning themselves in this shallow pool of water. If they had been in usual activity, I should have had a chase to capture them. Poor things! that’s the end.”
“Be they all dead, every single one?” demanded Robert from his slippery perch.
“I think so; you can come down now.”
He did so rather gingerly, lifting his feet very high when he stepped upon the moist earth of the poultry yard, and almost expecting to see a small head arise beneath his every footprint. “You’re a awful funny lady, Miss Brook.”
“Why so, dear?” asked that person, continuing her examination of the place and mentally determining the cost of the needed repairs.
“’Cause you’re sorry for things, yet you keep on a killin’ ’em, an’ ’cause you ain’t afraid of snakes. I never saw any before, ’cept up to the park, in the menagerie. I—I—” He paused, looked anxiously toward his mother, thrust his hands in his pockets, turned quite red in the face, and finally blurted out: “I ain’t a-goin’ to keep no hen things, I ain’t.”
“Why, Robert!” and “Why, Robert?” fell from both women’s lips at the same instant.
“Because, an’—’cause, I—I know it sounds awful cowardy, but I don’t like snakes, an’ there ain’t no use pertendin’ I do. I wouldn’t dast to come here alone.”
“Is it possible! The boy who boasts he is afraid of nothing!”
“Wull—wull—you see. Why, Mother, you’re afraid yourself! You must know how it seems. If one should bite your little boy, how dretful bad you’d feel! Wouldn’t you?”