The darkness and the inaction and the waiting and the sickening odor were sapping his morale. His imagination was turning against him and playing him false. He could not, as before, check up the situation with his eyes. He felt that the snake was wriggling little by little through the vise which held it. In that awful darkness he had a feeling that any second he might feel the sting of deadly fangs in his foot or ankle. He was panic-stricken--plunged in ghastly apprehension and horror. In his growing terror he could not bear the feel of those moving coils upon his leg; he would have given anything to be able to free himself of that living, spiral mass. Yet here his impulse eclipsed his good sense. If the snake had known enough to free its body it might indeed have had a chance to free itself, or at least move a few inches in the vise which held it. By following its blind instinct to coil, it had placed itself in a position where it could not contribute the full measure of its strength to pulling and wriggling. It exerted a _dead_ pull but not an _agitated and spasmodic_ pull. If that horrible rattlesnake had possessed the intelligence of a fox it would have got its poisonous fangs into Brent in short order. But it coiled in blind instinct, as they always do, and made the conflict a mere tug of war instead of a wrestling match, as one might say. It could have lashed Brent and squirmed frantically until it got free. For the pressure of his foot was not invincible. But a snake has no brains, and there you are. Yet this constant pulling, pulling, pulling under his foot was bad enough. It was appalling in the darkness. Again and again he looked above and listened. Would Tom never come? Each time he looked the light through the overflowing brush seemed fainter. Then there seemed no light at all. And again the sun seemed to go out of his life. Light, blessed, cheering, companionable light, had been snatched from beneath him, then from above him. And Brent Gaylong was alone in the world, in a deep, dank hole crowded with unsavory débris, vines and smelling moss and loathsome fungus and deformed toadstools. Nature’s outcasts. And mud and rock. The gathering night above him had no cheering voice; not even a cricket or a locust could he hear; they did not patronize such places. Only darkness. He pressed harder with his foot; his whole leg was aching. Could the fatal poison be in his veins? How? Absurd.... It was just the pressure that made his leg ache. And must this pressure go on all night? Until he dropped? Just then the rock which was the little theatre of his terrible deadlock, the rock on which his weary feet pressed, sank a little in the oozy bottom of the dark well.... CHAPTER XVII—Seen in the Twilight