“There has been no one at the house since you left. There was a shot though; I heard it myself.”
“Whar away?”
“I think down by the creek—maybe in the woods beyond the orchard.”
“Thar ain’t nothin’ in them woods, ’ceptin’ squrrl. Who’s been squrrl shootin’ this time o’ day?”
“Some boys, perhaps?”
“Boys! Hey! what’s that dog a draggin’ out from ’mong the peach trees? Snake, by the Eturnal!—a rattler too! The hound ain’t killed that varmint himself?”
The old hunter, yielding to curiosity, or some undeclared impulse, stepped down from the porch, and out to where the hound had come to a stop, and was standing by the body of the snake.
Driving the dog aside, he stooped over the dead reptile to examine it.
“Shot through the skull!” he muttered to himself; “an’ wi’ a rifle, o’ sixty to the pound. That ere’s been a hunter’s gun. Who ked it be? It’s been done this side of the crik, too; seems as the dog hain’t wetted a hair in fetchin’ o’t.”
Turning along the trail of the snake—which, to his experienced eye, was discernible in the grass—he followed it, till he came to the spot where the snake had been killed.