Mary Elizabeth looked away at Grandmother Beers, snipping sweet-peas. Abruptly, Mary Elizabeth threw herself on the grass and stared up through the branches of the Eating Apple tree, and then laid her arms straight along her sides, and began luxuriously to roll down a little slope. The inquiry was too complex to continue.
“Let’s go see if the horse-tail hair is a snake yet,” she proposed, sitting up at the foot of the slope.
“I’ll have to do my canary,” said Delia, but she sprang up with the rest of us, and we went round to the rain-water barrel.
The rain-water barrel stood at the corner of the house, and reflected your face most satisfyingly, save that the eaves-spout got in the way. Also, you always inadvertently joggled the side with your knee, which set the water wavering and wrinkled away the image. At the bottom of this barrel invisibly rested sundry little “doll” pie-tins of clay, a bottle, a broken window-catch, a stray key, and the bowl of a soap-bubble pipe, cast in at odd intervals, for no reason. There were a penny doll and a marble down there too, thrown in for sheer bravado and bitterly regretted.
Into this dark water there had now been dropped, two days ago, a long black hair from the tail of Mr. Branchett’s horse, Fanny. We had been credibly informed that if you did this to a hair from a horse’s tail and left it untouched for twenty-four hours or, to be perfectly safe, for forty-eight hours, the result would inevitably be a black snake. We had gone to the Branchetts’ barn for the raw material and, finding none available on the floor, we were about to risk jerking it from the source when Delia had perceived what we needed caught in a crack of the stall. We had abstracted the hair, and duly immersed it. Why we wished to create a black snake, or what we purposed doing with him when we got him created, I cannot now recall. I believe the intention to have been primarily to see whether or not they had told us the truth—“they” standing for the universe at large. For my part, I was still smarting from having been detected sitting in patience with a handful of salt, by the mouse-hole in the shed, in pursuance of another recipe which I had picked up and trusted. Now if this new test failed....
We got an old axe-handle from the barn wherewith to probe the water. If, however, the black snake were indeed down there, our weapon, offensive and defensive, would hardly be long enough; so we substituted the clothes-prop. Then we drew cuts to see who should wield it, and the lot fell to Betty. Gentle little Betty turned quite pale with the responsibility, but she resolutely seized the clothes-prop, and Delia stood behind her with the axe-handle.
“Now if he comes out,” said Betty, “run for your lives. He might be a blue racer.”
None of us knew what a blue racer might be, but we had always heard of it as the fastest of all the creatures. A black snake, it seemed, might easily be a blue racer. As Betty raised the clothes-prop, I, who had instigated the experiment, weakened.
“Maybe he won’t be ready yet,” I conceded.
“If he isn’t there, I’ll never believe anything anybody tells me again—ever,” said Delia firmly.