Page:Wild folk - Samuel Scoville.djvu/117

Rh thicket a few rods away, and out darted the weasel, which, with the fierce patience of his kind, had been lurking there and came between the chipmunk and the scattered homes of the colony.

Over the hilltop was the only way of escape. There lay a patch of deep woods, where the trees grew thick and dark over a ledge of rock which stretched up to the very summit. There, too, was hidden some mystery as black as the shade above that lonely ledge. Often there had been no return for chipmunks crossing that dark crest. Instinctively the fugitive avoided the woods and circled the hill hoping to find some refuge on the farther side.

Long ago, the weasel-folk have learned that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Wherefore to-day the hunter followed the diameter of the circle that the chipmunk was making around the wooded hilltop. Like a flash, with tail up and head down, the weasel wound his way among the rocks and crowded trees which covered the hill's crest. As his triangular head thrust itself beyond a pointed rock which jutted out from the ledge, his quick nostrils caught a sinister, sickly scent, and he checked in his stride but—too late. His flaming red eyes looked directly into the fixed glare of two other eyes, black, lidless, with strange oval pupils, and set deep in a cruel heart-shaped head, which showed a curious hole between eye and nostril, the hall-mark of the fatal family of pit-vipers to which the rattlesnake, copperhead, and moccasin belong.

For a second the fierce beast and the grim snake