He followed glumly, gnawing his lip, wanting to say he knew not what, but wretchedly tongue-tied, noting that the great white moth was still waving its creamy wings on the dead stump and wondering if she would take the cape jessamines. He felt an embarrassed relief when, passing the roots where they lay, she stooped to raise them.
Then all at once the blood seemed to shrink from his heart. With a hoarse cry he leaped toward her, seized her wrist and roughly dragged her back, feeling as he did so, a sharp fiery sting on his instep. The next moment, with clenched teeth, he was viciously stamping his heel again and again, driving into the soft earth a twisting root-like something that slapped the brown wintered leaves into a hissing turmoil.
He had flung her from him with such violence that she had fallen sidewise. Now she raised herself, kneeling in the feathery light, both hands clasped close to her breast, trembling excessively with loathing and feeling the dun earth-floor billow like a canvas sea in a theater. Little puffs of dust from the protesting ground were wreathing about her set face, and she pressed one hand against her shoulder to repress her shivers.
“The horrible—horrible—thing!” she said whisperingly. “It would have bitten me!”
He came toward her, panting, and grasping her hand, lifted her to her feet. He staggered slightly as he did so, and she saw his lips twist together oddly. “Ah,” she gasped, “it bit you! It bit you!”
“No,” he said, “I think not.”
“Look! There on your ankle—that spot!”
“I did feel something, just that first moment.” He laughed uncertainly. “It’s queer. My foot’s gone fast asleep.”
Every remnant of color left her face. She had known a negro child who had died of a water-moccasin’s bite some years before—the child of a house-servant. It had been wading in the creek in the gorge. The doctor had said then that if one of the other children....