Carolyn May wanted awfully to speak to Miss Amanda. The brown lady with the pretty roses in her cheeks sat on the log by the brook, her face turned from the path Joseph Stagg and his little niece were coming along. She must have known they were coming down the glade and who they were, for nobody could mistake the identity of Prince, and the dog would not be out in the woods with anybody but his little mistress.
Miss Parlow, however, kept her face steadily turned in the opposite direction. And Uncle Joe was quite as stubborn. He stared straight ahead down the path without letting the figure on the log get into the focus of his vision.
Carolyn May did not see how it was possible for two people who loved each other, or who ever had loved each other, to act so. They must have thought a great deal of each other once upon a time, for Chet Gormley’s mother had said so. The very fact that they now acted as they did proved to the observant child that the situation was not normal.
She wanted to seize Uncle Joe’s hand and whisper to him how pretty Miss Amanda looked. She wanted to run to the lady and talk to her. Thus far she had found little opportunity for knowing Miss Amanda Parlow well, although Carolyn May and the old carpenter were now very good friends.
Hanging to Uncle Joe’s hand, but looking longingly at the silent figure on the log, Carolyn May was going down to the stepping-stones by which they were to cross the brook, when, suddenly, Prince came to a halt right at the upper end of the log and his body stiffened.
“What is it, Prince?” whispered his little mistress. “Come here.”
But the dog did not move. He even growled—not at Miss Amanda, of course, but at something on the log. And it was just then that Carolyn May wanted to scream—and she could not!
For there on the log, raising its flat, wicked head out of an aperture, its lidless eyes glittering, and its forked tongue shooting in and out of its jaws, was a snake, a horrid, silent, writhing creature, the look of which held the little girl horror-stricken and speechless.
Uncle Joe glanced down impatiently, to see what made her hold back so. The child’s feet seemed glued to the earth. She could not take another step.
Writhing out of the hole in the log and coiling, as it did so, into an attitude to strike, the snake looked to be dangerous, indeed. The fact that it was only a large blacksnake and non-poisonous made no difference at that moment to the dog or to the little girl—nor to Joseph Stagg when he saw it.