d had taken refuge beneath the
straw. He had almost knelt on it. Escaping, a movement of his foot had
raised its anger and it had struck, it was now whisking back into the
darkness of the cabin beyond the straw heap.

He recognised it as the deadliest snake in the South.

For a moment he recognised nothing else but the fact that he had been
bitten.

His passion and desire had vanished utterly. Phyl might have been a
thousand miles away from him for all that he thought of her.

He rose up and came out into the sunlight, went to the well head, sat down
on the frame and removed his shoe and sock. The mark of the bite was there
between the adductor tendons. A red hot iron and a bottle of whisky might
have saved him. He had not even a penknife to cut the wound out--He
thought of Phyl, she could do nothing. He thought of the bar of the
Charleston Hotel, and the verse of the song about the old hen with a
wooden leg and the statement that it was just about time for another
little drink, ran through his head.

Then suddenly the idea came to him that there might possibly be help at
the village where he had obtained the food from the coloured woman. It was
a long way off, but still it was a chance.

He put the sock in his pocket, put on the shoe and started. He ran for the
first couple of hundred yards, then he slackened his pace, then he stopped
holding one hand to his side.

The poison already had hold of him.

The game was up and he knew it. It was useless to go on, he would not live
to reach the village or reaching it would die there.

And every one would pity him with that shuddering pity people extend to
those who meet with a horrible form of death.

Death from snake bite was a low down business, it was no end for a
Grangerson; but there in the swamp to the left a man might lie forever
without being found out.

He turned from the road to the left and walked away among the trees.

The ground here sank beneath the foot, a vague haze hung above the marsh
and the ponds. Here nothing happened but the change of season, night and
day, the chorus of frogs and the crying of the white owl amidst the
trees.

CHAPTER VII

Miss Pinckney and Phyl left Grangersons next morning at seven o'clock to
return to Charleston.

During the night the Colonel had sent after the horses and they had been
captured and brought back. The broken phaeton was left for the present.

"I'll make Silas go and fetch it himself when he c