hain't got more'n two more loads o' powder here."

And, thereupon, Jack leaped suddenly in the air and, turning quite around,
lighted with his nose pointed, as it was before he sprang. Chad cocked the old
gun and stepped forward. A low hissing whir rose a few feet to one side of the
path and, very carefully, the boy climbed a fallen trunk and edged his way,
very carefully, toward the sound: and there, by a dead limb and with his ugly
head reared three inches above his coil of springs, was a rattlesnake. The
sudden hate in the boy's face was curious--it was instinctive, primitive,
deadly. He must shoot off-hand now and he looked down the long barrel, shaded
with tin, until the sight caught on one of the beady, unblinking eyes and
pulled the trigger. Jack leaped with the sound, in spite of Chad's yell of
warning, which was useless, for the ball had gone true and the poison was set
loose in the black, crushed head.

"Jack," said Chad, "we just GOT to go down now."

So they went on swiftly through the heat of the early afternoon. It was very
silent up there. Now and then, a brilliant blue-jay would lilt from a stunted
oak with the flute-like love-notes of spring; or a lonely little brown fellow
would hop with a low chirp from one bush to another as though he had been lost
up there for years and had grown quite hopeless about seeing his kind again.
When there was a gap in the mountains, he could hear the querulous, senseless
love-quarrel of flickers going on below him; passing a deep ravine, the note
of the wood-thrush--that shy lyrist of the hills--might rise to him from a
dense covert of maple and beech: or, with a startling call, a red-crested cock
of the woods would beat his white-striped wings from spur to spur, as though
he were keeping close to the long swells of an unseen sea. Several times, a
pert flicker squatting like a knot to a dead limb or the crimson plume of a
cock of the woods, as plain as a splash of blood on a wall of vivid green,