two movements almost simultaneous, half his slender, whip-like length drew back and flashed forward again, and the battle was joined.
It was a strange fight that raged amid the short weeds and crisp dead leaves at the bottom of the roadside ditch. It had scarcely begun when the ragged black boy, who, a few minutes before had escaped death by so narrow a margin, came at a rapid trot along the road, closely followed by a negro man bearing in his hand a stout hickory stick. These two, hearing a great threshing among the weeds, stood at the entrance of the path leading down into the ditch and watched the duel.
They saw a writhing, twisting yellow and black object whose shape changed and changed again swiftly and incessantly—now straightening convulsively to a length of full six feet, and lashing from side to side, now compacted into a streaked and mottled ball-like mass. It was not easy at first to follow the fortunes of the battle; but presently the man made out that a slender black spiral encircled the forward part of the rattler's thick trunk and that the rattler's head, despite the fetters wound about his neck, struck again and again against some part of this black spiral, the long curved fangs piercing each time the thin mail of the kingsnake's body. The man knew that with every stroke of those hollow fangs, each of them a full inch in length, an-
