With a deep growl the dog started on the boy's trail. Pepper could hear him crashing his way through the underbrush and ran as fast as he could, looking about him, as he ran, for a stick or a stone with which to defend himself, but could see none, and all the time the dog was coming closer and closer, his growl becoming more and more menacing. It was nearly upon him, and he imagined that he could feel its hot breath and expected every moment to feel the snap of its jaws, when he saw, a little way ahead of him, what looked like a stout black stick lying upon the ground. "Gee! that's lucky," thought Pepper, running to where the stick lay and, stooping to pick it up when, to his astonishment and terror, the supposed stick glided from under his hand and he saw that he had been about to grasp a large-sized snake. Springing to his feet he made a wild jump upward and, as luck would have it, caught at the branch of a tree above his head, and, getting a firm grasp, drew himself up just as the dog, with its teeth snapping, sprang at him.
"Crickets!" said the boy to himself, "but that was a close shave," meantime climbing up into the tree to a more comfortable perch. "I don't know which of them I like the least. It looks as though there was going to be something doing now."
So intent had been the dog in its pursuit of Pepper that he did not see the snake until he had run onto it as it lay coiled upon the ground when, with a cry of alarm, the dog bounded into the air, clearing the snake by half a dozen feet. Apparently forgetting the quarry which it had been so eagerly pursuing, the dog now turned its attention to the snake, which was the largest that Pepper had ever seen.
For a few moments Pepper was too fascinated to move, as he watched the strangest combat that he had ever seen going on beneath him. A combat in which neither of the combatants seemed desirous of assuming the aggressive. Lying in a close coil, with its head rising from the center, its forked tongue darting in and out, and emitting every now and then an angry hiss, the snake, swaying its head from side to side, closely followed in its movements those of the dog, which circled about it barking furiously, and apparently watching for an opportunity to seize it back of the head, but which the snake was too wary to permit.
[Illustration: "The strangest combat that he had ever seen.">[
"This beats the circus," thought Pepper, after he had watched the fight for a little time, "but this isn't getting the message to Highpoint. I don't believe I have time to wait for the finale. I wonder how I am going to get out of this. If I drop down there they will be making a show of me. Looks as though I might get over into that next tree. I'll try it, anyhow."
The trees here had grown so close together that many of the branches were in-lacing, and it seemed possible to Pepper that he could get from the one tree into the other.
"It looks kind of thin," thought Pepper, when he had picked out a limb which extended into the adjoining tree, "but, perhaps, it will do."
Crawling out upon the branch until it bent and swayed dangerously under his weight, he caught a branch of the other tree and swung himself over, narrowly missing a fall.
"So far, so good," soliloquized Pepper, working his way toward the trunk. "I rather like this way of going. Now for the next one."