Page:J Allan Dunn--The Girl of Ghost Mountain.djvu/21

Rh The mesquite was high enough for Sheridan to risk rising to his feet and travel with his body bent double from the hips. The sparkle in his eyes changed to a steely glitter at the bawl of the calf and he increased his speed through the thick, jungly growth, parting the feathery leaves in wide ripples of changing hue as he brushed them aside. But he still went cautiously and, when he came to a flat outcrop of rock that saddled the draw, he flattened again and crept on his belly along a crack that made a zigzag trough across the ledge. It was oven-hot under the sun, almost scorching to knees and palms, and the sweat dripped from his forehead as he went.

A brisk rattle sounded, a burr-r-r of alarm, electric in its sudden signal. Sheridan halted, his hand going swiftly back to the grip of his gun and staying there while his whole body stiffened and his eyes swept the low ledges for the owner of that warning.

Not ten feet away a diamond-back rattlesnake lay, its body inflated and flung into a graceful fighting coil, the jetty eyes glittering, the blunt head poised for a lightning strike, the tongue waving slowly in and out of the opened mouth where the poison fangs were already lifting their hollow, curving needles for the deadly injection; to take toll for this invasion of the reptile's sunning ground. The greenish-yellow body, stamped with a connected chain of brown, diamond-shaped blotches, outlined in white, the vivid black and white bars of the tail, the uplifted rattle, were indelibly photographed upon Sheridan's memory. For a few heartbeats man and snake faced each other, both alert,