action of its
tongue. When she moved, its head followed her, but she dexterously pinned
it to the rock with her forked stick and placed the heel of her moccasin
upon its writhing body. Then, stooping, she severed its head from its body
with her knife.

She put the head in a square of cloth and continued her search. After a
time, she found another, and when she went down the hill there were three
heads in the blood-soaked square of cloth. She hid them in the willows,
and went into the house to stir the contents of the tin cup. She noted
with evident satisfaction that it had thickened somewhat. Little Coyote's
woman had told her it would do so. She found a bottle which had contained
lemon extract, and this she rinsed. She measured a teaspoonful of the
thick, reddish-brown liquid and poured it into the bottle, filling it
afterward with water. The cup she took with her into the willows. Laying
the heads of the snakes upon a flat stone, she cut them through the jaws,
and, extracting the poison sac, stirred the fluid into the tin cup. While
she stirred, she remembered that she had heard an owl hoot the night
before. It was an ill-omen, and it had sounded close. The hooting of an
owl meant harm to some one. She wondered now if an owl feather would not
make the medicine stronger. She set down her cup and looked carefully
under the trees, but could find no feathers. Ah, well, it was stout enough
medicine without it!

She had brought a long, keen-bladed hunting-knife into the willows, and
she dipped the point of it into the concoction--blowing upon it until it
dried, then repeating the process. When the point of the blade was well
discolored, she muttered:

"Dat's de strong medicine!"

Her eyes glittered like the eyes of the snakes among the rocks, and they
seemed smaller. Their roundness and the liquid softness of them was gone.
She looked "pure Injun," as Smith would have phrased it, with murder in
her heart. Deliberately, malevolently, she spat upon the earth beneath
which the letter lay, before she returned to the house.

She heard Susie's voice in the Schoolmarm's room, and quickly hid the
knife behind a mirror in the living-room, where she hid everything which
she wished to conceal, imagining, for some unknown reason, that no one but
herself would ever think of looking there. Susie often had thought
laughingly that it looked like a pack-rat's nest.

The woman poured the liquid which remained in the tin cup into anoth