The circle of brightness had disappeared. Brent’s foot and the rock and
the snake’s head were blotted out. He could see nothing now, only feel
the coiled reptile around his leg. Instinctively, he pressed more
firmly. The snake relaxed a trifle, being probably less agitated in the
darkness.
Even in his frightful predicament, Brent noted with interest how every
instinctive impulse of the snake was evidenced in the pressure and
relaxation of its coiling body. But he was all but panic-stricken now in
the enshrouding darkness; he could only feel and hear his would-be
assailant. The sudden failure of that little flashlight was like the sun
going out of his life.
The rank growth on the surface above overflowed into the deep hole and
had taken root here and there in crevices of the loose or fallen
masonry. Looking up Brent had not even an unbroken view of the little
area of sky above the shaft. He could only see little glints of light
through the brush. This unwholesome growth, starved of open sunlight,
was damp and emitted a pungent, sickening odor. He wondered whether this
horrible deadlock would end in his falling in a faint from the
unwholesome air, and being attacked during unconsciousness. Well, in
that case, he reflected, he would never know the feeling of the
serpent’s fangs.
There was no light below now, and only checkered glints of light above.
He wondered what time it was and why Tom did not come. Tom, all-round
scout that he was, could have told him that one loses all sense of time
in a predicament occurring in darkness. He could have told him (as he
later told me) of the hunter who was imprisoned by a rock falling
against the mouth of a cave in the Rockies and was rescued after three
hours’ waiting. He thought he had been in the cave two days.
But, in any case, it was getting dark above: Brent could see that. The
failure of the flashlight had confounded several moves he had been
considering. They had not been pleasant moves to think of, but they had
been less unpleasant to think of than death. He had thought of trying to
reach his knife, which had dropped in among the dank growth in the well,
and stab the snake with it. He had feared that if he stooped and dealt
with the head his action might result in a certain relaxation of his
foot’s pressure with instant fatal results. So nicely did he calculate
in the dreadful position he was in. He had hesitated to jeopardize his
safety by any kind of action. So, also, stooping and groping in that
enveloping mesh for his knife might cause the imprisoning foot to
stir--relax. So he had done nothing. And now, in darkness, he did not
dare to try anything. He could only hold on.
And he feared he was not doing even that. In the uncertainty of the
darkness he thought that the wriggling neck was making some headway.
Suppose that smooth, incessantly wriggling and struggling snake should
succeed in working enough of its neck through the trap which held it, to
enable the creature to turn its head and dart its fangs into the shoe.
Could it do that? Could it possibly contrive by its constant wriggling
to reach the unprotected ankle? Brent was glad that his were high shoes.
But his fears were now manifold.
The darkness and the inaction and the waiting and the sickening odor
were sapping his morale. His imagination was turning against him and
playing him false. He could not, as before, check up the situation with
his eyes. He felt that the snake was wriggling little by little through
the vise which held it. In that awful darkness he had a feeling that any
second he might feel the sting of deadly fangs in his foot or ankle. He
was panic-stricken--plunged in ghastly apprehension and horror.
In his growing terror he could not bear the feel of those moving coils
upon his leg; he would have given anything to be able to free himself of
that living, spiral mass. Yet here his impulse eclipsed his good sense.
If the snake had known enough to free its body it might indeed have had
a chance to free itself, or at least move a few inches in the vise which
held it. By following its blind instinct to coil, it had placed itself
in a position where it could not contribute the full measure of its
strength to pulling and wriggling. It exerted a _dead_ pull but not an
_agitated and spasmodic_ pull.
If that horrible rattlesnake had possessed the intelligence of a fox it
would have got its poisonous fangs into Brent in short order. But it
coiled in blind instinct, as they always do, and made the conflict a
mere tug of war instead of a wrestling match, as one might say. It could
have lashed Brent and squirmed frantically until it got free. For the
pressure of his foot was not invincible. But a snake has no brains, and
there you are.
Yet this constant pulling, pulling, pulling under his foot was bad
enough. It was appalling in the darkness. Again and again he looked
above and listened. Would Tom never come? Each time he looked the light
through the overflowing brush seemed fainter. Then there seemed no light
at all. And again the sun seemed to go out of his life. Light, blessed,
cheering, companionable light, had been snatched from beneath him, then
from above him. And Brent Gaylong was alone in the world, in a deep,
dank hole crowded with unsavory débris, vines and smelling moss and
loathsome fungus and deformed toadstools. Nature’s outcasts. And mud and
rock.
The gathering night above him had no cheering voice; not even a cricket
or a locust could he hear; they did not patronize such places. Only
darkness. He pressed harder with his foot; his whole leg was aching.
Could the fatal poison be in his veins? How? Absurd.... It was just the
pressure that made his leg ache. And must this pressure go on all night?
Until he dropped?
Just then the rock which was the little theatre of his terrible
deadlock, the rock on which his weary feet pressed, sank a little in the
oozy bottom of the dark well....