"I go, too," added Trouble. "I 'ike to see Snuff roll!"
"No, you had better stay here with me," suggested Janet, and she ran to the barn door to catch hold of her little brother before he could toddle after Teddy.
"I want to go! Lemme go!" cried Trouble, and he struggled to get away from Janet.
"No, you must stay with sister," said the little girl, as pleasantly as she could. "Look, I'll show you a new trick that Slider, our pet alligator, can do. Trouble like to see Slider do a trick?" she asked. "Come on, Trouble! See Slider do his sliding trick!"
Baby William was not proof against this attraction. He ceased trying to pull away from Janet and let her lead him back to the alligator's tank. There Janet took up the scaly, long-tailed creature, which was idly crawling around, and put him on top of the slanting board, as Teddy had been about to do when Trouble told about Snuff. Janet did not mind picking up Slider.
The Curlytops were not afraid of animals that many girls and boys do not like to handle. Janet and Teddy knew a great deal about snakes, and they knew that only two kinds that lived in their State were harmful. These were the rattlesnake and the copperhead. All other kinds, such as black snakes, milk snakes and garter snakes can never harm a person. Teddy and Janet knew this, and they had been taught by their father that these harmless snakes did a great deal of good by eating rats and mice that, otherwise, would spoil the farmers' grain.
So it was that Janet had learned to pick up even large black snakes, knowing they would not harm her, and once she and her brother had even tamed a good-sized black snake, so that it would let the children pick it up, and it would lie, coiled, in their lap.
Snakes can not be tamed, or made to do tricks like other animals, and the stories of "snake charmers" are mostly untrue. Some snakes may rise and sway when music is played, and the snakes that circus performers handle are just as harmless as the garden snakes you see. Some of the larger ones, however, are very powerful, and can twist themselves around a person or an animal strongly enough to kill. But the performers know how to handle snakes, using slow and gentle movements, so the reptiles do not mind it.
Thus it was that Janet had no fear of Slider, the pet alligator. She lifted him up, put him on top of the slanting board and, just as he had done before, Slider went sliding down.
"Oh! Oh!" cried Trouble in delight.