Presently two girls made their appearance and Marcella came back. “We’ll make our way over to the road, Lucia. I’ve got a guard stationed to stop any automobile that looks as if it were being driven by anybody safe—nobody that would kidnap us for ransom, I mean. Come on, if you think you can walk as far as the road.”
“I could walk all the way home, Marcella,” said Lucia, smiling for the first time. “There is nothing the matter with me but a scare. Wait till I take a look at that snake!”
By this time Betty dared push the stone off the snake’s head, and they all regarded it. They all agreed that it was a “big garter snake,” though Lucia remarked that she could tell better about its belonging to the dangerous group if she could have seen the shape of the head. “But it’s shapeless now, poor thing,” said Betty. “You did a bad thing for yourself, snakey, when you bit Lucia!”
“It was only protecting itself,” said Lucia.
“What was that medicine, Lucia?”
“I don’t know how Mother fixed it, but I heard her ask Uncle if he kept any permanganate of potash crystals, and when he said no, she sent to the drug store. She wrapped this bottle in cotton and told me not to lose it. I had full instructions what to do if I got bitten by a—rattler, I believe. Mother makes a lot of fuss over me!” Lucia closed her remark rather apologetically, but the other girls were far from any critical thought. The Countess Coletti had “fussed” to some purpose this time. If it had been a diamond-backed rattlesnake! And perhaps it wasn’t the garter snake that had bitten Lucia. Mathilde now kept bringing that up with little sympathetic remarks like, “It is such a shame, Lucia! I do hope that it will prove to be nothing serious. I don’t think that it could have been a rattlesnake, do you, Betty?”
Mathilde had screamed and run to a safe distance before she knew what it was all about. Cautiously she had approached to see what had happened and ran again as Betty started after the snake. Again she had tried to come up and be sympathetic, but could not stand it to see the wound. “I faint so easily, girls,” she had said, weakly, when the knife came out. “I’ll have to go away.”
“Well if there’s any fainting to be done,” Marcella had said, “don’t do it here!”
But the girls scarcely thought of Mathilde at all until it was all over and she sat down by Lucia on the hillside. Alas for Mathilde, and she had wanted to join the sorority to which Marcella belonged! Yet Mathilde had not been trained to courage or helpfulness and was not altogether to blame for her inefficiency on this occasion. It had been a difficult situation, when speed was a necessary element and knowing what to do another.
“I looked out for the stick,” said Mathilde, handing the alpenstock to Lucia, who took it with a smile.