he trail
towards her husband. Yet, in her intense curiosity, she leaned out
the next moment to watch him. He paused at last, not far from the
approaching figure, and seemed to kneel down on the trail. What was he
doing? Her husband was still slowly advancing. Suddenly he stopped. At
the same moment she heard their two voices in excited parley, and then,
to her amazement, she saw her husband scramble hurriedly down the trail
to the lower level, and with an occasional backward glance, hasten away
until he had passed beyond her view.

She could scarcely realize her narrow escape when Leonidas stood by her
side. "How did you do it?" she said eagerly.

"With a rattler!" said the boy gravely.

"With a what?"

"A rattlesnake--pizen snake, you know."

"A rattlesnake?" she said, staring at Leonidas with a quick snatching
away of her skirts.

The boy, who seemed to have forgotten her in his other abstraction of
adventure, now turned quickly, with devoted eyes and a reassuring smile.

"Yes; but I wouldn't let him hurt you," he said gently.

"But what did you DO?"

He looked at her curiously. "You won't be frightened if I show you?" he
said doubtfully. "There's nothin' to be afeerd of s'long as you're with
me," he added proudly.

"Yes--that is"--she stammered, and then, her curiosity getting the
better of her fear, she added in a whisper: "Show me quick!"

He led the way up the narrow trail until he stopped where he had knelt
before. It was a narrow, sunny ledge of rock, scarcely wide enough for
a single person to pass. He silently pointed to a cleft in the rock, and
kneeling down again, began to whistle in a soft, fluttering way. There
was a moment of suspense, and then she was conscious of an awful gliding
something,--a movement so measured yet so exquisitely graceful that she
stood enthralled. A narrow, flattened, expressionless head was followed
by a footlong strip of yellow-barred scales; then there was a pause, and
the head turned, in a beautifully symmetrical half-circle, towards the
whistler. The whistling ceased; the snake, with half its body out of the
cleft, remained poised in air as if stiffened to stone.

"There," said Leonidas quietly, "that's what Mr. Burroughs saw, and
that's WHY he scooted off the trail. I just called out William Henry,--I
call him William Henry, and he knows his name,--and then I sang out to
Mr. Burroughs what was up; and it was lucky I did, for the next moment
he'd have been on top