They had driven a mile farther, when the mules again pricked up their long ears, and this time a small pack of wolves crossed the road twenty rods in front, in a hurry, as if pursued or pursuing. They stopped not, nor so much as looked at the travelers, and were lost to view in an instant or so.
The Lieutenant here mischievously inquired, "Mrs. E., is it here you would like to escape from me 'into the deep tangled wildwood?'" That lady only answered with a shudder. Misfortunes, _on dit_, never come single; so with frights. They had now reached the muddy malarious Brazos, and ferried across by virtue of a military pass, and had gone a full mile beyond. The pressure of fear had begun to yield as they saw open daylight through the tunnel, a quarter mile in the distance, but now again the _mulos_ suddenly halt in a fright, and this time with snorting fear, snuffing danger near!
"Look there ahead in the track! See that awful snake coiled there!" exclaimed Emma. Again the Lieutenant was on the ground, gun in hand; and again the fair ones object. But he was not deterred from the purpose of bruising the serpent's head. Providing himself with a dead limb that had fallen from the trees above, he went bravely to the attack; first firing a bullet at his snakeship's head as it stood raised in arched defiance over the complex coils, ready for the springing bite of death! The bullet carried away the crest of the head, which threw the reptile into fearful contortions, and then, with terrific blows from the limb of the tree, he soon brought it to a quiet quivering rattle! It was a fearfully large spotted wood rattlesnake, and by the tape measured eight feet three inches in length, and had seventeen rattles. Relieving the highway of its presence, and casting it into the brush by the wayside, they passed on, querrying, "What next in the line of sensation?" and thinking, that for the first half day, and the first ten miles, the events of the morning would suffice all fancy for that class of romance.
Again the cruel Lieutenant asks something about escaping "into the deep tangled wildwood." But Mrs. E. extorts a promise from him of silence on that subject in the future; at least till they get out of the woods.