CHAPTER III.
But Molly Trueheart was not sulking in the garret as Ginny Ann had reported to her “ole miss.”
She had slept but a little while when she was awakened by a sound that made her spring to her feet with a shriek of alarm—the hurrying and scurrying of immense rats across the attic floor. Her black eyes opened wide in terror, and she sprang upon the sofa, and stood watching the loathsome animals as, startled by her scream, they scampered to their holes.
“Good gracious! There must have been a hundred of the nasty little vermin!” ejaculated Molly. In reality there had not been more than a dozen, but her terrors had magnified their numbers. “Ugh! ugh! ugh! how they make my flesh creep!” she continued, shuddering nervously and drawing her skirts close around her dainty little feet. “And to think that they might have bitten me in my sleep, the monsters! I wonder, Idowonder if Aunt Thalia intends for me to stay here all night! I sha’n’t do it! so there, no, not if Louise loses every cent of the fortune,” her eyes sparkling resentfully. “I don’t want my hair to turn white in one night from terror.”
Stillness reigned again, for the rodents, as much alarmed by her presence as she was by theirs, were trembling in their hiding-places. Molly sprang down and ran over to the window, which, without much difficulty, she flung open, letting in a flood of fresh air.
At the same moment she clapped her pretty dimpledhands together and uttered a cry of mischievous pleasure.
“Molly Trueheart, you limb of mischief, I knew you would be sure to have a lark if you stayed any longer at Ferndale!”
Close to that side of the house grew a stately oak tree that flung out its long, strong arms close to the window-sill. The large, laughing dark eyes were fixed on the tree while she spoke, and in another moment she climbed up into the window, twined her round white arms about a stout branch, and swung herself forward with kitten-like agility into the big tree, sliding from limb to limb until she was securely seated on a stout branch with her back against the body of the oak.
“Farewell, my late companions!” she cried gayly, waving her hand at the window, and thoroughly enjoying her escapade. “Oh, how delicious this is after Aunt Thalia’s musty old garret! I think I shall sleep in this tree all night. The big limbs and thick green leaves will make me a splendid bed, and—ouch, oh, Lord have mercy! oh! oh! oh!” and as the last exclamation left her lips, Molly’s hold on the tree relaxed, and she went crashing down, with a rustle of breaking twigs and scattering leaves, through the branches to the ground, where she lay groaning on the grass amid thedebriscollected during her fall.
For, lifting her bright eyes to the higher branches of the tree, she had suddenly beheld an immense black snake hanging downward with his tail curled around a stout twig, and his head thrust forward toward her, while his keen little eyes glowed in the green obscurity of the thick leafage like baleful jewels.
Molly had given such a start and scream of terror that she had tumbled headlong through the tree at least twenty feet from the ground, but the soft, thick grass and the leaves that had fallen with her, had so broken the severity of the fall that after the first groan she was able to rise slowly to her feet and exclaim between laughter and tears:
“‘Och, I’m kilt intirely,’ as Paddy would say. Now I wonder if I can be having the delirium tremens, seeing rats and snakes like this! It can’t be, for I’ve never been addicted to the intoxicating glass! I believe I’ve broken my arm, it hurts so bad. Good heavens, it’s coming down the tree! It must be a racer. I’ll have to cut and run!”
This she did with surprising agility, only pausing to look behind her once when she saw his snakeship, which did indeed belong to the racer species, trailing his shining length rapidly after. With a half sob in her throat, Molly flew on and on over hay-fields and hills, fences and brooks, until she had left Ferndale a mile behind her, and came up with a jerk against some tall, white palings that inclosed the beautiful lawn she had admired while riding that day—the Laurens place, as old Abe had called it in answer to her curious questions.