Red Flannel Mike had slapped the gun from his hands and made him understand, somehow, that it was all over; that they were through. But they watched him the rest of the night.
That was why, as the argument rose around the morning camp-fire, Coulter was very sure that he knew what he would do under one set of circumstances. He knew one experience that nothing on earth could send him through again. All that, and more, was in his tone, as he spoke.
At his words there came a restless stirring around the fire. Those men of the engineering gang had seen something of his experience. They knew what he was thinking. The abrupt ending of their argument showed that they agreed with Coulter.
He saw, and understood; and, seeing, smiled bitterly. They knew only a part of it.
To every man there is his one fear. The bravest man that ever trod the earth had his one especial dread. To some, it is fire; to others, cold steel; others still, the clash of physical contact. But, probe deep enough beneath the skin of any man alive, and you find it.
Snakes were Coulter’s fear.
He could not explain it. He did not know why he, a man city-bred and born, had this obsession. It had been with him since he could remember. As a child, once he had gone into a convulsion of fear over some pictures of snakes in a book.
The old women of the family nodded their heads wisely, and muttered things about a fright to his mother before his birth. Coulter did not know. All that he was certain about was that the thought, even, of the writhing, slippery squirming bodies, made his whole being shudder with revulsion, made tingles of absolute horror go up and down his back.
Yes, the gang agreed with him. Yet they had seen only a part of what he had gone through. They had seen and appreciated only his physical suffering--and that was the least part.
Coulter’s nerves were in ragged shreds. He started and jumped at the slightest sound. His experience had intensified a thousandfold his nervous horror of reptiles.
The woods, the swamp, were full of them. He ran upon them constantly. All the time he was longing for his hour of liberation, when he could return to the city and to freedom.
The unexpected flutter of a thrush, as he walked through the woods, would send his heart into his throat and his pulse to pounding in fear. Night after night he woke, chained hand and foot with dread that a snake had crawled up, in the dark, beside him. All the stories he had ever read of their crawling up into camps and getting into the bedding, came to him, lingered with him, tortured him. He was no more asleep before he would awake, bathed in a cold sweat, afraid to move, afraid to lie still.
All that, subconsciously, was in his words, in his manner, in his whole expression, as he said:
“I don’t know about that.”
* * * * *
There came the silence of conviction. Even Red Flannel Mike, most zealous exponent of man’s lack of knowledge of himself, was silenced.
“Somebody said something about the kid.” Baldy, the eighteen-year-old, seized his advantage. “I’ll bet that even she--”
Baldy stopped abruptly. His whole frame stiffened. His eyes were riveted upon little Ruth. One by one, the rest of the gang turned to follow his gaze. Each followed his example.
Ruth’s scream cut the air a moment before Baldy’s gasp of horror:
“My God! The kid’s _got a moccasin on her_!”
The child was close enough for the group to see clearly. Her head was bent back, straining away from the writhing horror. The sleek head slithered to and fro, darting, threatening, winding here and there about her. She seemed frozen with fear.
Baldy had started forward. He stopped.
“I--get me a gun!” he barked. “Get a gun! _Quick!_”
The reptile drew back its head. There came an interruption:
White to his lips, staggering upon his feet, Coulter came forward. His face was ghastly pale. His unwilling feet buckled under him, threatening, each moment, to give way and pitch him forward upon his face.
Slowly he edged closer. The slender head poised, watchful. Coulter’s movements were scarcely discernible. Suddenly his well arm shot out, seizing, snatching at that loathsome body.
There was a quick movement of the snake, far too rapid to be anticipated or avoided. The head drove forward. He felt the white hot flash of pain.
The rest was a haze of horror to him. It was rather as if he were a spectator at something concerning someone else. He did not command his body. He knew only, vaguely, what was happening.
There came the feel of a sleek body in his hands, the lash and writhing against his arms of something that fought to break away; then the grinding of his heel upon a head, and the flinging, against him, in death agony.
Everything faded out, then.
* * * * *
His return to consciousness was marked by a hazy lightness of memory.
In the bitten arm he could feel, mounting higher and higher, the numbness that had marked the other experience. His heart, too, seemed to be acting queerly--just as it had done before.
Red Flannel Mike’s broad back was bent from him as he mixed at something in a basin. They had carried him to his own tent.
Coulter’s holster was hanging from the tent pole. The numbness crept higher in his arm. Soon would begin the cutting of his flesh, the darting flames of pain....
He could not go through with that again! He could not bear it. Better far to finish with the gun what Mike had stopped before.
Softly he slid the gun from the holster, and raised it for action. His finger pressed upon the trigger.
The weapon was dashed suddenly from his hand.
“What the hell!” roared Mike. “You fool, what’s the matter with you?”
“Give--give me that gun!”
“You’re as bad as Baldy Jenkins. Been in the woods all his life--and mistakes a coach whip for a moccasin, just because both of ’em are darkish.
“That wasn’t any more moccasin than a polar bear.... Yes, ’course he struck you. Any snake ’ll do that--but it ain’t always poison. Your arm ain’t even go’ner be sore.
“Never mind about this gun. I’ll give it back to you--later on.”
[Illustration]
_You’ll Be Thrilled and Mystified By Hamilton Craigie’s New Novelette_
The Chain
_I._
TROUBLE.
Quarrier entered the taxi with an uneasy sense of crisis.
He was not imaginative; his digestion was excellent; even at forty, an age when most men nowadays have begun to feel the strain of fierce business competition, Quarrier was almost the man that he had been ten years in the past.
Nerves and Quarrier were strangers; he smoked his after-dinner cigar in a rigorous self-denial that made it his sole dissipation; he was in bed and asleep when other men were comfortably faring forth in search of such diversion as the metropolis had to offer.
But the face of that taxi-driver--he had seen it somewhere before. It was a dark, Italian face, with high cheekbones, and a straight, cruel mouth, like a wedge, between lean cheeks scarred and scabbed with late-healed cicatrices and pocked blue with powder burns.
Not an inviting face. And the taxi was old. Glancing at the cushions, as they had roared past an arc-light at the street corner, Quarrier had thought to see the dingy leather sown thick with stains, broad patches, as if--as if....
But pshaw! As he told himself, he was getting fanciful; perhaps his liver, at last, had played him false. A migraine, doubtless--he’d have a look in on old Peterby in the morning. Peterby was a good, plain old-fashioned practitioner--no nonsense about _him_....
He had gone to the offices of the Intervale Steel Company on a mission, an important one. As a matter of fact, it was vital--almost a matter of life and death. But he smiled grimly now in the dark recesses of the cab as he reflected that, as it chanced, his last-minute decision had left those documents where they would be beyond the reach of--Hubert Marston, for instance.
He had nothing on his person of any special value; he would be poor picking, indeed, if, as it chanced, that taxi-driver with the face of a bravo might, behind the sinister mask that was his face, be the thug he seemed, hired, perhaps, by the Panther of Peacock Alley.
An extravagant appellation, doubtless, but that was Marston: Suave, sinister, debonair--the social _roturier_ equally with the manipulator. He had acquired the name naturally enough, for most of his operations were carried on in the hotels and clubs.
He had an office hard by the “Alley” and it was from its ornate splendor that he issued, on occasion, gardenia in buttonhole, cane hooked over his arm, dark face with its inscrutable smile flashing upon the habitués with what meaning only he could say. And he did not choose to tell.
And Marston had wanted those documents; they spelled the difference to him between durance and liberty--aye, between life and death....
For Hubert Marston had made the one slip that, soon or late, the most careful criminal makes: He had, yielding on a sudden to his one rare impulse of hate, commissioned the murder of a man who stood in his way, and--he had paid for it, as he had thought, in good crisp treasury notes, honest as the day, certainly! But the payment had been made at second--or third-hand--that was Marston’s way. And for once it had betrayed him.