Openings in the Old Trail

“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 of him and have been struck, for rattlers don’t give way to any one.”

“Oh, why didn’t you let”—She stopped herself quickly, but could not stop the fierce glint in her eye nor the sharp curve in her nostril. Luckily, Leonidas did not see this, being preoccupied with his other graceful charmer, William Henry.

“But how did you know it was here?” said Mrs. Burroughs, recovering herself.

“Fetched him here,” said Leonidas briefly.

“What in your hands?” she said, drawing back.

“No! made him follow! I HAVE handled him, but it was after I’d first made him strike his pizen out upon a stick. Ye know, after he strikes four times he ain’t got any pizen left. Then ye kin do anythin’ with him, and he knows it. He knows me, you bet! I’ve bin three months trainin’ him. Look! Don’t be frightened,” he said, as Mrs. Burroughs drew hurriedly back; “see him mind me. Now scoot home, William Henry.”

He accompanied the command with a slow, dominant movement of the hickory rod he was carrying. The snake dropped its head, and slid noiselessly out of the cleft across the trail and down the hill.

“Thinks my rod is witch-hazel, which rattlers can’t abide,” continued Leonidas, dropping into a boy’s breathless abbreviated speech. “Lives down your way—just back of your farm. Show ye some day. Suns himself on a flat stone every day—always cold—never can get warm. Eh?”

She had not spoken, but was gazing into space with a breathless rigidity of attitude and a fixed look in her eye, not unlike the motionless orbs of the reptile that had glided away.

“Does anybody else know you keep him?” she asked.

“Nary one. I never showed him to anybody but you,” replied the boy.

“Don’t! You must show me where he hides to-morrow,” she said, in her old laughing way. “And now, Leon, I must go back to the house.”

“May I write to him—to Jim Belcher, Mrs. Burroughs?” said the boy timidly.

“Certainly. And come to me to-morrow with your letter—I will have mine ready. Good-by.” She stopped and glanced at the trail. “And you say that if that man had kept on, the snake would have bitten him?”

“Sure pop!—if he’d trod on him—as he was sure to. The snake wouldn’t have known he didn’t mean it. It’s only natural,” continued Leonidas, with glowing partisanship for the gentle and absent William Henry. “YOU wouldn’t like to be trodden upon, Mrs. Burroughs!”

“No! I’d strike out!” she said quickly. She made a rapid motion forward with her low forehead and level head, leaving it rigid the next moment, so that it reminded him of the snake, and he laughed. At which she laughed too, and tripped away.

Leonidas went back and caught his trout. But even this triumph did not remove a vague sense of disappointment which had come over him. He had often pictured to himself a Heaven-sent meeting with her in the woods, a walk with her, alone, where he could pick her the rarest flowers and herbs and show her his woodland friends; and it had only ended in this, and an exhibition of William Henry! He ought to have saved HER from something, and not her husband. Yet he had no ill-feeling for Burroughs, only a desire to circumvent him, on behalf of the unprotected, as he would have baffled a hawk or a wildcat. He went home in dismal spirits, but later that evening constructed a boyish letter of thanks to the apocryphal Belcher and told him all about—the trout!

He brought her his letter the next day, and received hers to inclose. She was pleasant, her own charming self again, but she seemed more interested in other things than himself, as, for instance, the docile William Henry, whose hiding-place he showed, and whose few tricks she made him exhibit to her, and which the gratified Leonidas accepted as a delicate form of flattery to himself. But his yearning, innocent spirit detected a something lacking, which he was too proud to admit even to himself. It was his own fault; he ought to have waited for her, and not gone for the trout!

So a fortnight passed with an interchange of the vicarious letters, and brief, hopeful, and disappointing meetings to Leonidas. To add to his unhappiness, he was obliged to listen to sneering disparagement of his goddess from his family, and criticisms which, happily, his innocence did not comprehend. It was his own mother who accused her of shamefully “making up” to the good-looking expressman at church last Sunday, and declared that Burroughs ought to “look after that wife of his,”—two statements which the simple Leonidas could not reconcile. He had seen the incident, and only thought her more lovely than ever. Why should not the expressman think so too? And yet the boy was not happy; something intruded upon his sports, upon his books, making them dull and vapid, and yet that something was she! He grew pale and preoccupied. If he had only some one in whom to confide—some one who could explain his hopes and fears. That one was nearer than he thought!

It was quite three weeks since the rattlesnake incident, and he was wandering moodily over Casket Ridge. He was near the Casket, that abrupt upheaval of quartz and gneiss, shaped like a coffer, from which the mountain took its name. It was a favorite haunt of Leonidas, one of whose boyish superstitions was that it contained a treasure of gold, and one of whose brightest dreams had been that he should yet discover it. This he did not do to-day, but looking up from the rocks that he was listlessly examining, he made the almost as thrilling discovery that near him on the trail was a distinguished-looking stranger.

He was bestriding a shapely mustang, which well became his handsome face and slight, elegant figure, and he was looking at Leonidas with an amused curiosity and a certain easy assurance that were difficult to withstand. It was with the same fascinating self-confidence of smile, voice, and manner that he rode up to the boy, and leaning lightly over his saddle, said with exaggerated politeness: “I believe I have the pleasure of addressing Mr. Leonidas Boone?”

The rising color in Leonidas’s face was apparently a sufficient answer to the stranger, for he continued smilingly, “Then permit me to introduce myself as Mr. James Belcher. As you perceive, I have grown considerably since you last saw me. In fact, I’ve done nothing else. It’s surprising what a fellow can do when he sets his mind on one thing. And then, you know, they’re always telling you that San Francisco is a ‘growing place.’ That accounts for it!”

Leonidas, dazed, dazzled, but delighted, showed all his white teeth in a shy laugh. At which the enchanting stranger leaped from his horse like a very boy, drew his arm through the rein, and going up to Leonidas, lifted the boy’s straw hat from his head and ran his fingers through his curls. There was nothing original in that—everybody did that to him as a preliminary to conversation. But when this ingenuous fine gentleman put his own Panama hat on Leonidas’s head, and clapped Leonidas’s torn straw on his own, and, passing his arm through the boy’s, began to walk on with him, Leonidas’s simple heart went out to him at once.

“And now, Leon,” said the delightful stranger, “let’s you and me have a talk. There’s a nice cool spot under these laurels; I’ll stake out Pepita, and we’ll just lie off there and gab, and not care if school keeps or not.”

“But you know you ain’t really Jim Belcher,” said the boy shyly.

“I’m as good a man as he is any day, whoever I am,” said the stranger, with humorous defiance, “and can lick him out of his boots, whoever HE is. That ought to satisfy you. But if you want my certificate, here’s your own letter, old man,” he said, producing Leonidas’s last scrawl from his pocket.

“And HERS?” said the boy cautiously.

The stranger’s face changed a little. “And HERS,” he repeated gravely, showing a little pink note which Leonidas recognized as one of Mrs. Burroughs’s inclosures. The boy was silent until they reached the laurels, where the stranger tethered his horse and then threw himself in an easy attitude beneath the tree, with the back of his head upon his clasped hands. Leonidas could see his curved brown mustaches and silky lashes that were almost as long, and thought him the handsomest man he had ever beheld.

“Well, Leon,” said the stranger, stretching himself out comfortably and pulling the boy down beside him, “how are things going on the Casket? All serene, eh?”

The inquiry so dismally recalled Leonidas’s late feelings that his face clouded, and he involuntarily sighed. The stranger instantly shifted his head and gazed curiously at him. Then he took the boy’s sunburnt hand in his own, and held it a moment. “Well, go on,” he said.

“Well, Mr.—Mr.—I can’t go on—I won’t!” said Leonidas, with a sudden fit of obstinacy. “I don’t know what to call you.”

“Call me ‘Jack’—‘Jack Hamlin’ when you’re not in a hurry. Ever heard of me before?” he added, suddenly turning his head towards Leonidas.

The boy shook his head. “No.”

Mr. Jack Hamlin lifted his lashes in affected expostulation to the skies. “And this is Fame!” he murmured audibly.

But this Leonidas did not comprehend. Nor could he understand why the stranger, who clearly must have come to see HER, should not ask about her, should not rush to seek her, but should lie back there all the while so contentedly on the grass. HE wouldn’t. He half resented it, and then it occurred to him that this fine gentleman was like himself—shy. Who could help being so before such an angel? HE would help him on.

And so, shyly at first, but bit by bit emboldened by a word or two from Jack, he began to talk of her—of her beauty—of her kindness—of his own unworthiness—of what she had said and done—until, finding in this gracious stranger the vent his pent-up feelings so long had sought, he sang then and there the little idyl of his boyish life. He told of his decline in her affections after his unpardonable sin in keeping her waiting while he went for the trout, and added the miserable mistake of the rattlesnake episode. “For it was a mistake, Mr. Hamlin. I oughtn’t to have let a lady like that know anything about snakes—just because I happen to know them.”

“It WAS an awful slump, Lee,” said Hamlin gravely. “Get a woman and a snake together—and where are you? Think of Adam and Eve and the serpent, you know.”

“But it wasn’t that way,” said the boy earnestly. “And I want to tell you something else that’s just makin’ me sick, Mr. Hamlin. You know I told you William Henry lives down at the bottom of Burroughs’s garden, and how I showed Mrs. Burroughs his tricks! Well, only two days ago I was down there looking for him, and couldn’t find him anywhere. There’s a sort of narrow trail from the garden to the hill, a short cut up to the Ridge, instead o’ going by their gate. It’s just the trail any one would take in a hurry, or if they didn’t want to be seen from the road. Well! I was looking this way and that for William Henry, and whistlin’ for him, when I slipped on to the trail. There, in the middle of it, was an old bucket turned upside down—just the thing a man would kick away or a woman lift up. Well, Mr. Hamlin, I kicked it away, and”—the boy stopped, with rounded eyes and bated breath, and added—“I just had time to give one jump and save myself! For under that pail, cramped down so he couldn’t get out, and just bilin’ over with rage, and chockful of pizen, was William Henry! If it had been anybody else less spry, they’d have got bitten,—and that’s just what the sneak who put it there knew.”

Mr. Hamlin uttered an exclamation under his breath, and rose to his feet.

“What did you say?” asked the boy quickly.