THE MORNING WATCH
227
writhing and unkillable defiance, and at length he struck and dazed, and
struck and missed, and struck and broke the head which nevertheless
lifted senilely, the tongue flittering and the one remaining eye entering
his own eye like a needle; and again, and the head lay smashed and
shifting among its debris; and again, and it was flattened against the
stone, though still the body, even out beyond the earlier wound, lashed,
lay resting, trembled, lashed.
As he watched this trembling twitching, desperately wishing that
he could so crush the snake that it would never move again, he realized
that it would not die until sundown, and even as he realized this he
heard Hobe say it and became aware, through something quiet
in
Hobe's
voice and through Jimmy's shyness, that they respected him; that in put–
ting his bare hand within range of that clever head and
in
killing so
recklessly and with such brutality, he had lost their contempt and
could belong among them if he wanted to. He looked coldly at his tremb–
ling hand: bloody at the knuckles and laced with slime, which seemed
to itch an.d to burn as it dried, it still held the rock.
"Better warsh that stuff off," Hobe said. "Git in your blood:
boy!"
He still squatted, looking at his hand and wondering. In their
good opinion, and in the rugged feeling of the hand itself and its
ferocious moisture, he began to feel that he had been brave in a way
he had never been brave before and he wanted the hand to clear
gradually and naturally, the way the smudge clears from the forehead on
Ash Wednesday. He could not be sure, in its pristine skin, what kind of
snake this was, and the head was wrecked beyond any hope of de–
termining whether it had the coffin shape, or venomous fangs. But it
was not a rattler, nor was it likely a copperhead, nor was it striped like
a moccasin, so that he had to doubt whether, after all, it had been
poisonous.
If
it had not been poisonous he had not been brave; and if
it had not been poisonous he was sorry he had killed it or even been fool
enough to yell so the others would see it and so automatically kill it,
for he had for a long while been fascinated by snakes and had felt that
the harmless ones ought to be let alone, as few people let them alone.
He was aware that Hobe had spoken and that he had given no kind of
answer, and this made him uneasy. He wanted very much to taste the
slime; but they were watching. He turned up the rock and looked
at it: the slime and breakage of the snake caught the whitening sun–
light like mica. He slammed the rock into the middle of the water (just
about where I dove
in,
he realized upon reflection) and clambered cau–
tiously down to the edge and thrust his hand into the cold water and up
to the elbow, beating quietly in the brilliant cold, and watched it in
