He pulled out his handkerchief and tied it loosely around her leg above the knee, thrust in a short piece of driftwood stick, and twisted the handkerchief to savage tightness. Next, and all by hearsay, working swiftly, he opened the small blade of his pocket-knife, burned it with several matches to make sure against germs, and cut carefully but remorsely into the two lacerations made by the snake’s fangs. He was in a fright himself, working with feverish deftness and apprehending at any moment that the pangs of dissolution would begin to set in on the beautiful form before him. From all he had heard, the bodies of snake-victims began to swell quickly and prodigiously. Even as he finished excoriating the fang-wounds, his mind was made up to his next two acts. First, he would suck out all poison he possibly could; and, next, light a cigarette and with its live end proceed to cauterize the flesh. But while he was still making light, criss-cross cuts with the point of his knife-blade, she began to move restlessly. “Lie down,” he commanded, as she sat up, and just when he was bending his lips to the task. In response, he received a resounding slap alongside of his face from her little hand. At the same instant the Indian lad danced out of the jungle, swinging a small dead snake by the tail and crying exultingly: “Labarri! Labarri!” At which Francis assumed the worst. “Lie down, and be quiet!” he repeated harshly. “You haven’t a second to lose.” But she had eyes only for the dead snake. Her relief was patent; but Francis was no witness to it, for he was bending again to perform the classic treatment of snake-bite. “You dare!” she threatened him. “It’s only a baby labarri, and its bite is harmless. I thought it was a viperine. They look alike when the labarri is small.” The constriction of the circulation by the tourniquet pained her, and she glanced down and discovered his handkerchief knotted around her leg. “Oh, what have you done?” A warm blush began to suffuse her face. “But it was only a baby labarri,” she reproached him. “You told me it was a viperine,” he retorted. She hid her face in her hands, although the pink of flush burned furiously in her ears. Yet he could have sworn, unless it were hysteria, that she was laughing; and he knew for the first time how really hard was the task he had undertaken to put the ring of another man on her finger. So he deliberately hardened his heart against the beauty and fascination of her, and said bitterly: “And now, I suppose some of your gentry will shoot me full of holes because I don’t know a labarri from a viperine. You might call some of the farm hands down to do it. Or maybe you’d like to take a shot at me yourself.” But she seemed not to have heard, for she had arisen with the quick litheness to be expected of so gloriously fashioned a creature, and was stamping her foot on the sand. “It’s asleep—my foot,” she explained with laughter unhidden this time by her hands.