The snake was at large, and might waylay me from any bush or tuft of grass. The moonbeams were ghostly and the stillness of the wide solitude was eerie. Being but a child,—and a girl-child,—I thought of these things, and of the likelihood of meeting runaway negroes, and mad dogs, and stray sane curs whose duty it was to attack nocturnal trespassers, and of a vicious bull never let out to roam the pasture except at night. I was afraid of them all, intellectually. My heart was too full of a mightier dread to let bugbears turn me back. I ran right on until the branch, a silver ribbon on the dark bosom of the meadow, was before me. Grasses and weeds were laden with dew, and the water whirled and whispered about the roots. I could have believed that the purling formed itself into words when I knelt down to fumble for the snake-bite cure. I would not let myself be scared. I kept saying over and over—"To save his life! to save his life!"
In the intensity of my excitement, language that I was afraid was blasphemous, yet could not exclude from my mind, pressed upon me:—
"He saved others. Himself he cannot save!"
He might be dying now. He had said that the poultice ought to be applied at once. Horrid stories of what had happened to people who were bitten by rattlesnakes and cobras tormented me, and would not be beaten off.
"A copperhead, I think he said. How could he know that it was not a cobra? Would he swell up, turn black, and expire in convulsions before I could reach him?" I said "expire in convulsions," out of a book. Everyday Virginia vernacular fell short of the exigency.
My feet were drenched, my pantalettes and skirts were bedraggled up to the knees, my eyes were large and black in my colorless face, when I burst into the chamber, and threw the bunch of priceless herbs into Cousin Molly Belle's lap. I was too spent for speech.
Cousin Frank's coat and vest were off; his right shirt-sleeve was rolled up to the shoulder, and he was holding his hand and wrist in a deep bowl of warm water. The air reeked with the fumes of whiskey and hartshorn.
I concluded, when I came to think of it the next day, that the whiskey must have been doing antidotal work by getting into his head, for he laughed outright at sight of the specific I had brought. Then, tears—real tears and plenty of them—suffused his eyes and made his voice weak and husky. Or—was it the whiskey?
"You are a dear, brave, thoughtful Namesake!" he said, clearing his throat. "Darling!" to his wife who was eyeing the herbs wonderingly,—"She has been all the way to the lower meadow for those. I showed her the snake-bite cure to-day. Bruise them and put them on my wrist. Then Namesake must get off her wet clothes and go to bed. The danger is over."
I was thirty years old before I found out that what I had risked so much to procure was not the panacea he had showed me, but common jewel-weed, or wild touch-me-not, a species of the Impatiens of botanists, harmless, but not curative.