Two or three things happened to revive this foolish dread. One of them occurred about a week after the invalid"s arrival at The Place.
Lady, being no fonder of guests than was Lad, had given the veranda and the house itself a wide berth. But one day, as Baby lay in the hammock (trying in a wordy irritation to teach Lad the alphabet), and as the guest sat with her back to them, writing letters, Lady trotted around the corner of the porch.
At sight of the hammock"s queer occupant, she paused, and stood blinking inquisitively. Baby spied the graceful gold-and-white creature. Pushing Lad to one side, she called, imperiously:
"Come here, new Doggie. You pretty, _pretty_ Doggie!"
Lady, her vanity thus appealed to, strolled mincingly forward. Just within arm"s reach, she halted again. Baby thrust out one hand, and seized her by the ruff to draw her into petting-distance.
The sudden tug on Lady"s fur was as nothing to the haulings and maulings in which Lad so meekly reveled. But Lad and Lady were by no means alike, as I think I have said. Boundless patience and a chivalrous love for the Weak, were not numbered among Lady"s erratic virtues. She liked liberties as little as did Lad; and she had a far more drastic way of resenting them.
At the first pinch of her sensitive skin there was an instant flash of gleaming teeth, accompanied by a nasty growl and a lightning-quick forward lunge of the dainty gold-white head. As the wolf slashes at a foe--and as no animals but wolf and collie know how to--Lady slashed murderously at the thin little arm that sought to pull her along.
And Lad, in the same breath, hurled his great bulk between his mate and his idol. It was a move unbelievably swift for so large a dog. And it served its turn.
The eye-tooth slash that would have cut the little girl"s arm to the bone, sent a red furrow athwart Lad"s ma.s.sive shoulder.
Before Lady could snap again, or, indeed, could get over her surprise at her mate"s intervention, Lad was shouldering her off the edge of the veranda steps. Very gently he did this, and with no show of teeth. But he did it with much firmness.
In angry amazement at such rudeness on the part of her usually subservient mate, Lady snarled ferociously, and bit at him.
Just then, the child"s mother, roused from her letter-writing by the turmoil, came rushing to her endangered offspring"s rescue.
"He growled at Baby," she reported hysterically, as the noise brought the Master out of his study and to the veranda on the run. "He _growled_ at her, and then he and that other horrid brute got to fighting, and----"
"Pardon me," interposed the Master, calling both dogs to him, "but Man is the only animal to maltreat the female of his kind. No male dog would fight with Lady. Much less would Lad--h.e.l.lo!" he broke off. "Look at his shoulder, though! That was meant for Baby. Instead of scolding Lad, you may thank him for saving her from an ugly slash.
I"ll keep Lady chained up, after this."
"But----"
"But, with Lad beside her, Baby is in just about as much danger as she would be with a guard of forty U. S. Regulars," went on the Master. "Take my word for it. Come along, Lady. It"s the kennel for you for the next few weeks, old girl. Lad, when I get back, I"ll wash that shoulder for you."
With a sigh, Lad went over to the hammock and lay down, heavily. For the first time since Baby"s advent at The Place, he was unhappy--very, _very_ unhappy. He had had to jostle and fend off Lady, whom he worshipped. And he knew it would be many a long day before his sensitively temperamental mate would forgive or forget. Meantime, so far as Lady was concerned, he was in Coventry.
And just because he had saved from injury a Baby who had meant no harm and who could not help herself! Life, all at once, seemed dismayingly complex to Lad"s simple soul.
He whimpered a little, under his breath; and lifted his head toward Baby"s dangling hand for a caress that might help make things easier. But Baby had been bitterly chagrined at Lady"s reception of her friendly advances. Lady could not be punished for this. But Lad could.
She slapped the lovingly upthrust muzzle with all her feeble force. For once, Lad was not amused by the castigation. He sighed, a second time; and curled up on the floor beside the hammock, in a right miserable heap; his head between his tiny forepaws, his great sorrowful eyes abrim with bewildered grief.
Spring drowsed into early summer. And, with the pa.s.sing days, Baby continued to look less and less like an atrophied mummy, and more like a thin, but normal, child of five. She ate and slept, as she had not done for many a month.
The lower half of her body was still dead. But there was a faint glow of pink in the flat cheeks, and the eyes were alive once more. The hands that pulled at Lad, in impulsive friendliness or in punishment, were stronger, too. Their fur-tugs hurt worse than at first. But the hurt always gave Lad that same twinge of pleasure--a twinge that helped to ease his heart"s ache over the defection of Lady.
On a hot morning in early June, when the Mistress and the Master had driven over to the village for the mail, the child"s mother wheeled the invalid chair to a tree-roofed nook down by the lake--a spot whose deep shade and lush long gra.s.s promised more coolness than did the veranda.
It was just the spot a city-dweller would have chosen for a nap--and just the spot through which no countryman would have cared to venture, at that dry season, without wearing high boots.
Here, not three days earlier, the Master had killed a copperhead snake. Here, every summer, during the late June mowing, The Place"s scythe-wielders moved with glum caution. And seldom did their progress go unmarked by the scythe-severed body of at least one snake.
The Place, for the most part, lay on hillside and plateau, free from poisonous snakes of all kinds, and usually free from mosquitoes as well. The lawn, close-shaven, sloped down to the lake. To one side of it, in a narrow stretch of bottom-land, a row of weeping willows pierced the loose stone lake-wall.
Here, the ground was seldom bone-dry. Here, the gra.s.s grew rankest.
Here, also, driven to water by the drought, abode eft, lizard and an occasional snake, finding coolness and moisture in the long gra.s.s, and a thousand hiding places amid the stone-crannies or the lake-wall.
If either the Mistress or the Master had been at home on this morning, the guest would have been warned against taking Baby there at all. She would have been doubly warned against the folly which she now proceeded to commit--of lifting the child from the wheel-chair, and placing her on a spread rug in the gra.s.s, with her back to the low wall.
The rug, on its mattress of lush gra.s.ses, was soft. The lake breeze stirred the lower boughs of the willows. The air was pleasantly cool here, and had lost the dead hotness that brooded over the higher ground.
The guest was well pleased with her choice of a resting place. Lad was not.
The big dog had been growingly uneasy from the time the wheel-chair approached the lake-wall. Twice he put himself in front of it; only to be ordered aside. Once the wheels. .h.i.t his ribs with jarring impact. As Baby was laid upon her gra.s.sy bed, Lad barked loudly and pulled at one end of the rug with his teeth.
The guest shook her parasol at him and ordered him back to the house. Lad obeyed no orders, save those of his two deities. Instead of slinking away, he sat down beside the child; so close to her that his ruff pressed against her shoulder. He did not lie down as usual, but sat--tulip ears erect, dark eyes cloudy with trouble; head turning slowly from side to side, nostrils pulsing.
To a human, there was nothing to see or hear or smell--other than the cool beauty of the nook, the soughing of the breeze in the willows, the soft fragrance of a June morning. To a dog, there were faint rustling sounds that were not made by the breeze. There were equally faint and elusive scents that the human nose could not register.
Notably, a subtle odor as of crushed cuc.u.mbers. (If ever you have killed a pit-viper, you know that smell.)
The dog was worried. He was uneasy. His uneasiness would not let him sit still. It made him fidget and shift his position; and, once or twice, growl a little under his breath.
Presently, his eyes brightened, and his brush began to thud gently on the rug-edge. For, a quarter mile above, The Place"s car was turning in from the highway. In it were the Mistress and the Master, coming home with the mail. Now everything would be all right. And the onerous duties of guardianship would pa.s.s to more capable hands.
As the car rounded the corner of the house and came to a stop at the front door, the guest caught sight of it. Jumping up from her seat on the rug, she started toward it in quest of mail. So hastily did she rise that she dislodged one of the wall"s small stones and sent it rattling down into a wide crevice between two larger rocks.
She did not heed the tinkle of stone on stone; nor a sharp little hiss that followed, as the falling missile smote the coils of a sleeping copperhead snake in one of the wall"s lowest cavities. But Lad heard it. And he heard the slithering of scales against rocksides, as the snake angrily sought new sleeping quarters.
The guest walked away, all ignorant of what she had done. And, before she had taken three steps, a triangular grayish-ruddy head was pushed out from the bottom of the wall.
Twistingly, the copperhead glided out onto the gra.s.s at the very edge of the rug. The snake was short, and thick, and dirty, with a distinct and intricate pattern interwoven on its rough upper body. The head was short, flat, wedge-shaped. Between eye and nostril, on either side, was the sinister "pinhole," that is the infallible mark of the poison-sac serpent.
(The rattlesnake swarms among some of the stony mountains of the North Jersey hinterland; though seldom, nowadays, does it venture into the valleys. But the copperhead--twin brother in murder to the rattler--still infests meadow and lakeside. Smaller, fatter, deadlier than the diamond-back, it gives none of the warning which redeems the latter from complete abhorrence. It is a creature as evil as its own aspect--and name. Copperhead and rattlesnake are the only pit-vipers left now between Canada and Virginia.)
Out from its wall-cranny oozed the reptile. Along the fringe of the rug it moved for a foot or two; then paused uncertain--perhaps momentarily dazzled by the light. It stopped within a yard of the child"s wizened little hand that rested idle on the rug. Baby"s other arm was around Lad, and her body was between him and the snake.
Lad, with a shiver, freed himself from the frail embrace and got nervously to his feet.
There are two things--and perhaps _only_ two things--of which the best type of thoroughbred collie is abjectly afraid and from which he will run for his life. One is a mad dog. The other is a poisonous snake. Instinct, and the horror of death, warn him violently away from both.
At stronger scent, and then at sight of the copperhead, Lad"s stout heart failed him. Gallantly had he attacked human marauders who had invaded The Place. More than once, in dashing fearlessness, he had fought with dogs larger than himself. With a d"Artagnan-like gaiety of zest, he had tackled and deflected a bull that had charged head down at the Mistress.
Commonly speaking, he knew no fear. Yet now he was afraid; tremulously, quakingly, _sickly_ afraid. Afraid of the deadly thing that was halting within three feet of him, with only the Baby"s fragile body as a barrier between.
Left to himself, he would have taken, incontinently, to his heels.
With the lower animal"s instinctive appeal to a human in moments of danger, he even pressed closer to the helpless child at his side, as if seeking the protection of her humanness. A great wave of cowardice shook the dog from foot to head.
The Master had alighted from the car; and was coming down the hill, toward his guest, with several letters in his hand. Lad cast a yearning look at him. But the Master, he knew, was too far away to be summoned in time by even the most imperious bark.
And it was then that the child"s straying gaze fell on the snake.