Spurrier paused and glanced about him, but before he had thrown down the hat he had taken from his perspiring forehead, a sound hideously unmistakable caused his heartbeat to miss its rhythm and pound in commotion.
Every man has his one terror, or, at least, one antipathy which he is unable to treat with customary calmness. With Spurrier it was everything reptilian. In the islands he had dreaded the snake menace more than fever or head hunters. Now, from the darkened floor near his feet came the vicious whir of rattles, and as his eyes flashed toward the sound he saw coiled there a huge snake with its flat, arrow-shaped head sinuously waving from side to side.
With an agility made lightning-quick by necessity, he leaped aside and, at the same instant, the snake launched itself with such venomous force that the sound of its striking and falling on the puncheon floor was like the lashing of a mule whip. The man had felt the disturbed air of its passing as of a sword stroke that had narrowly missed him.
But he had no leisure to regain the breath that had 147 caught startled in his throat, before, from his left, he heard again the ominous note of warning, and felt his scalp creep with horror. The place which he had left locked and believed to be mosquito proof, now seemed alive with the loathsome trespassers.
As Spurrier leaped for his couch he heard again the sound of a living coil released and its hawserlike lashing of the floor. Now he could see more plainly and, calculating his distance, he jumped for the table from which he could reach the loaded shotgun that hung on his wall. If he fell short, he would come down at their mercy—but he landed securely and without capsizing his support. His elevation gave him a precarious sort of safety, but on the floor below him he counted three rattlesnakes, crawling and recoiling; their cold-blooded eyes following his movements with baleful intentness.
Spurrier was conscious of his trembling hands as he leveled the weapon, and of a crawling sensation of loathing along his spine.
Twice the gun roared, splintering the flooring and spattering its ricochetting pellets, and two of the rattlers twisted in convulsive but harmless writhings. But the third head—and it seemed the largest of the three—had withdrawn under the cot. He was not even sure that these three made up the total. There might be others.
With painstaking care Spurrier came down and armed himself with a stout hickory flail which had been used in other days by some housewife in her primitive laundry work as a “battling stick.”
Then he advanced to the battle, swinging one end of the cot wide and shiftily sidestepping. The rattler 148 which lay in piled circles of coppery length regarded him with steely venom, turning its swaying head deliberately as its enemy circled. With the startling abruptness of an electric buzzer it warned and sprang. He escaped by an uncomfortable margin and attacked it with the flail before it could rearrange its coils. Finally he stood panting with exertion over the scene of slaughter.
As he searched the place with profoundest particularity his mind was analyzing the strange invasion. His house was as tight as he had thought it. There was no cranny that would have let in three large rattlers. How had they come there?