The daily morning journal and courier., 1906-07-21

drew ana QulVGF9Q beneath tHS SulI D rays as though each inch of it were endowed with q separate life. Un- seen insects brushed and fluttered up- on it, leaving beneath their light pres sure trail like fire on the blistered surface. The snake lay prone, exhausted almost beyond striking. The man, noting it, smiled grimly and scraped his fingers noisly in the loose earth. As the snake whirled to front the challenge, he curled his hand close with q taunt for it's frutile effort
 He was thus engrossed when sud- denly across his face swept a sense of delicious coolness. He turned his head; close above him almost within touch of a free hand a great black bird, carrion in every movement, how ered on steady, outspread wings. Its shadow fell across his face; it's eyes, beadlike and glistening and greedy, looked straight into his own.
 For an instant they stared thus, man and bird. Then with cry the man flung himself against his bonds, struggling and stratning at them for escape from this new horror. On his body, dry till now, the sweat poured forth in streams. Blood gushed from his nostrils. With shrieks, with oaths with stumbling words of prayer, he fought against the fate which held him.
 Not once but many times the strug- gle was repeated. When at last, ex- hausted, his convulsed body fell back to quiet, the bird was gone. Shud- deringly the man raised his eyes. Far up, half lost in bluep but ready, tire less, it hung above him.
 Turning his blanched cheek to the sand, he fell into sort of sleep. All drought the waning day he slept, though the approach of night and the swift desert change from heat to cold. When he awoke the first pale ame- thyst of dawn was in the sky. The snake was sleeping, not as snakes are wont to sleep in freedom, head tucked to tail and sinuous fold tapping on fold, but with his swollen body back thrown and stiffening against the stake which held him, caught mid-struggle by insensibility.
 The man turned his head to face him.
 ''FIey, rattler!' he called cheerily, and scraped some grains of sand to- ward the recumbent body.
 But when he saw the start and shudder with which the creature woke, the anguish of returning con- sciousness, suddenly he was sorry for his act. When the snake, writhing round struck at its cord quiverlng from head to tail, he would have given an hour of his own rest to have re- stored the sleep which he had broken,
 The sun rose presently. Again the weary panorama of the day unrolled before the eyes of the two victims, The snake was quiet, weakened by his long struggle. The man, strengthened by sleepl restored by the nights cold, held himself strongly in hand.
 Watching the indifference of the rep tile, the man feared less. Fixing his eyes upon it, he could hold hard to sanity and to endurance, though around him perched and hovered the vulture ministers of death.
 But as the morning passed a new came upon him. Suppose the snake should die first. It seemed to weaken with every hour and the man trembled. He spoke to 1t soothingly at times and had, or believed he had, the power of quieting it's paroxysnls. Tn his fevered mind he searched halt ingly for some knowledge of it's needs. Would it live longer for the taking of his life? And if by stretching out his hand he could delay it's end, what then of the Iengthening of its painE
 Before his dimming eyes the snake loomed, now a refuge, now a menace. A dozen times he half relaxed his hand, only to draw it close again. Once, when the snake fell in it's spring, seemingly dead, he thrust the fingers wide with a cry of utter deprivation When it moved again he drew them in, the instinctive love of life stlil strong upon him.
 He closed his eyes after this and for a long time lay still. only rolling his head from side to side that the vul- lures might not light upon his body.
 At last, when the sun lay low oa the horizon, he ceased the movement and again looked about him. Over head 9 cloud of birds. scared by the