The Snake Fiend by Farnsworth right. Even as a child, Jack Creamy delighted
in collecting reptiles, and he seemed to absorb much of their venomous nature.
His best loved pet was a large black snake, But when it caused him
a whipping by crawling into his father's bedroom, he roasted it over a slow
fire in a large pot, listening with glee to its agonized hissing, and
pushing it back with a stick when it strove to crawl out of the searing
container. It was no cause for wonder, then, that his burning love
for the girl of his dreams turned to fierce hate when she became the bride
of another. Creamy's sentiment for Marjorie Bressey was aroused by her fine Italian beauty,
which reminded him of his mother. He could have fallen in love with
any other girl as easily if he had set his mind to it in the
same way. By dint of comparing her with his mother's picture, he conceived
a great admiration for her. Then he wished to possess her, to be
her lord and master, to marry her, gazing on her every day with
this thought in his mind, his admiration grew to a burning passion. Of
all this, he said nothing to Marjorie, and then it was too late.
Marjorie loved and was loved by Alan Jimmerson, a young civil engineer.
Creamy neither threatened nor cajoled. He simply accepted the fact and meditated revenge.
He was all smiles at their wedding, and he gave them a wedding present
beyond what he could reasonably afford, while he planned to tumble their happiness in
ruins about their ears. After a short honeymoon, Jimmerson departed with his wife
to take up his duties as resident engineer of some construction work on the Western
Railroad. Creamy, his face glowing with friendship and goodwill, was the last
to clasp Marjorie's hand in farewell as the train pulled out of the station.
Write to me often, Marjorie, was his parting injunction. Send me a
letter as soon as you get settled, and let me know how you are
getting along. I don't want to lose touch with either of you, and
he meant it. Marjorie was fond of the handsome, manly looking Italian youth
and liked him immensely as a friend, although she had never been in love
with him. No sooner was she settled in her new home than she wrote
him a long letter telling of her husband's work, the bleakness of the desert
country, and the strange newness of her life. She and her husband occupied
a cabin together up from the bulk housing of the construction camp in the sagebrush
region of northern California, not far from the Nevada border. A fierce joy
and exultation leapt in Creamy's heart when he read Marjorie's letter. You would like
this country better than I do, she wrote, for it is infested with
rattlesnakes. The bare desert rocks on the ridge four miles from our cabin are
swarming with them. Uugh, they sun themselves in tangled masses, Alan says,
But truly, I can't bring myself to go near the place. I
get quite too much of snakes without that, for we are constantly killing them
in the sagebrush. This country has never been settled, and except for an
occasional prospector, there was nobody to kill them before the surveyors came. The
Indians never bothered the snakes, but passed by them on the other side of
a sagebrush and leave them in peace. Creamy scored these in red ink,
word by word, as if to blazon them on his memory, and he
drew little pictures of snakes on the margin. He burned out Marjorie's signature with
acid, spitefully watching with minute care as the letters faded, and gleaning a
savage satisfaction from seeing the paper run away under the venomous bite of the poison.
Then he fed the paper to the flames as he had roasted the black
snake years before, and watched the missive burn into black ashes and crumble slowly
away, page by page into gray dust. Followed Creamy's pursuit of the pair.
His arrival was not expected by either Jimison or Marjorie, but it was
nonetheless welcome for both of them. Like the genial, companionable Italian life on
the edge of the desert had few distractions at best, Creamy's eyes lit with
genuine pleasure at the sight of his prospective victims. The joy on both sides
was sincere. No, this isn't a pleasure trip, he explained to them,
although I expect to have pleasure enough out of it before I get through.
I have turned from collecting reptiles to studying their lives and habits. I
intend to write a monograph on rattlesnakes. When I got your letter, Marjorie,
I knew that I could do no better than to come here. I
expect to become very well acquainted with that ridge you wrote about, where the
snakes sun themselves in tangled masses. Marjorie shuddered, and Creamy laughed. Well,
don't bring any of your snakes around here, she said. I turned
cold, and something grips at my insides every time I hear one rattle.
Creamy built himself a small cabin about a mile from the Jimmersons, in the
direction of the rattlesnake ridge he had during the shack tastefully, and Marjorie's deft
hand gave it a distinctively feminine neatness and charm to its appearance. He became
a frequent visitor at the Jimmerson's cabin, and evening after evening he read to
them in his melodious, well modulated voice. Sometimes the draftsman or transitman would
come in and Creamy would join in playing cards until late at night. He
seemed to take pleasure in the company of Marjorie and her husband, and his
face always lit up at the sight of them, especially when they were together.
But it was the joy of a boy who sees the apples ripening for
him on the neighbor's tree and knows that they will soon be ready for him
to pluck. He was almost happy when he was meditating his frightful revenge.
As his preparations drew near their end, he often spent whole hours gloating over
the fate in store the couple. For Marjorie, in loving Jimmerson had aroused
him to insane jealousy, and Jimmerson, having robbed him of his heart's desire,
was included in Creamy's fierce hate of the girl who had crossed him.
Then one evening, Marjorie and her husband happened in at Creamy's cabin. Marjorie
expressed her horror at the thought of Creamy wandering among the snake infested rocks of
the Rattlesnake Ridge. The snake hunter seated her on a box that contained a
twisting knot of the venomous reptile. Marjorie, serenely unaware, talked on blithely,
and Creamy's merry laugh pealed out at regular intervals. He was in right
jovial mood that evening, for he was ready to spring the death trap prepared
for his two friends. He only awaited a favorable opportunity to strike. The
opportunity came when the surveyor's cook, crazed by bad whiskey, smashed up the
kitchen. Jimmerson discharged him, and the cook buttered threats of a horrible vengeance.
Shut up, Jimmerson ordered, this is the third time you've been seeing
snakes, and now you've wrecked the cookshack. You ought to be sent to
jail or a lunatic asylum. It's you that'll be seeing snakes. The cooks
fluttered, you and that Italian wife of yours will see plenty of them,
red and green, and Jimmerson struck him across the mouth and set him on
his way. This was in the evening. The draftsman and the rodsmen went
to town the next day to hire a new cook, while Jimmerson and Marjorie
went on an outing at the headwaters of the Feather Creek. It was Sunday,
and they intended to spend the day together, Cramini declined their invitation to
accompany them. It was the molting season, he explained, when the snakes
were casting off their skins. He could ill afford to lose a day of
observation at this time, for he had several perplexing points to clear up before
writing his monograph. Cramini walked fearlessly from rock to rock of the Rattlesnake Ridge,
chuckling to himself the tangled, massive snakes of which he had been told
existed only in rumor. Although there were snakes in plenty if one looked for
them. Tangled masses would serve his purpose later, but he had gathered them
here and there, one or two at a time. By noon, the
little cluster of cabins occupied by the engineers was deserted. Marjorie and her husband
had gone since sun up, and the surveyors were all in town. Not
a soul was stirring in the neighborhood of the shacks, and the men at
the construction camp were mostly lying around in their bunks playing cards. Cramenie nailed
fast the windows of Jimmerson's cabin. Then he entered and secured the bed to
the floor so that it could not be moved. He laboriously carried his box
of snakes a mile or more from his room to the little gully behind the
surveyor's cabins, and hid them in the sage brush. Marjorie and her husband
came back from their tramp after dark that evening, dog tired, Marjorie cooked
a little supper, and by ten o'clock the two were asleep. Cramini entered
their cabin about midnight. They were fast in the chains of slumber, and
he did not find it necessary to muffle his tread. He removed the chairs,
shoes, clothes, and even the hand mirror and toilet articles. Everything
that might serve as a weapon, no matter how slight, he took away.
Then he brought his snakes from the gully and collected them in front of
the cabin. When he had assembled them all, he knocked the top from
the largest box, carried it into the room, and, in the audacity
of his certain triumph, he dumped the twisted mass of rattlesnakes on the bed
where Marjorie and her husband lay asleep. The other boxes he emptied quickly just
inside the door and withdrew, for he had no wish to set foot among
the venomous serpents. Revenge is never satisfied if the retribution overtakes the avenger,
and Cromini had no wish to share the fate of his victims. He locked
the door from the outside and battened it. Then he removed the boxes that
had contained the snakes and returned to his cabin and peacefully went to sleep.
Marjorie awoke with the first rays of the sun and lazily opened her eyes.
Her heart leapt suddenly into her throat, and she was white awake in an
instant. A flat, squat head of a rattlesnake was creeping along her breast.
Its beady eyes were fixed on her face, and its red tongue flicked
before her like a forked flame. For a moment, she thought she was
still dreaming, but the familiar outlines of the room lying themselves in her consciousness,
and she knew that what she saw was real. Her shriek rent the
air as she threw back the bedclothes and sprang to the floor. She stepped
on a coiled serpent, which sounded an ominous warning as it struck out.
Blindly, she quickly climbed back on the bed and stood on the pillow,
screaming. Her husband was beside her, at once hazily trying to understand the
import of the hysterical torrent of words she was sobbing into his ears. For
an instant he thought she must be in the clutch of some horrible nightmare.
Then a quick startled glance around the room turned his blood to ice. There
was now a continuous rattling, as of dry leaves blowing against a stone wall.
For Marjory's screams had galvanized the snakes into activity. The room was filled
with their angry din It sounded in Jimmerson's ears like the crack of doom.
The floor seemed covered with the creeping reptiles. Some were coiled, the whirring
tips of their tails making an indistinct blur as they rattled, and their heads
swaying slowly back and forth. Others writhed along the floor, their venomous squat
heads thrusting forward and withdrawing, and their tongues darting out like red flames.
On the bed itself, there was a motion underneath the thrown back coverlet,
and the ugly gray head of a thick, four foot snake protruded from under
it, the evil eyes shining dully as if through a film of dust.
It extricated itself and coiled as if to strike. While Marjorie shrank fearfully against
the wall. Wide eyed with horror, Jimmerson attacked the reptile with the pillow,
sweeping it off the bed onto the floor. He quickly looked around him
for a weapon and saw at once that he was trapped. There was not
even a shoe or a pin cushion with which to fight the crawling, rattling
creatures. He tried to rock the bed toward the window as boys moved sawhorses
forward while sitting on them, but the bed was firmly fastened to the floor,
and in his efforts to release it, he was bitten on the wrist
by the strike of a large snake coiled near the foot of the bed.
Jimmerson flung the reptile across the room and sprang to the floor with an oath,
crushing a large rattler with his heel as he jumped. He raced to
the door and wrestled with it for a full minute before he discovered that he
and Marjorie were locked in that serpent hole. He sprang to the window and
felt a sharp stab of pain in the flesh of his calf, as the
open jaws of another reptile found their mark, and the poisoned fangs were embedded
deep in the flesh. The window, like the door, was nailed fast,
but he broke out the glass with his bare fists, unmindful of the
blood on his lacerated hands. He was back at the bedside, treading over
reptiles with his bare feet. Marjorie lay on the bed unconscious. He lifted
her in his bleeding arms and hurled her through the window to safety. He
struggled out after her, tearing open his bitten leg on the jagged pieces of
glass still left in the window frame. The spurting blood drenched him, and
he leaned, faint and dizzy against the cabin. As three of his surveyors
came running up, having been attracted by margine screams. In almost incoherent words,
he told them what had happened. He asked them to make immediate search
for the discharged cook, for there was no doubt in Jimmerson's mind that it
was the cook who had placed the snakes in the room. Then the sky
went suddenly black before his eyes, and he lost consciousness. At that minute,
Crimini was waking from a peaceful dream. He recalled what he had done
the night before, and blissfully mused on what must be taking place in the
Jimmerson cabin. A phantasmagorical succession of pictures weltered in his mind. Marjorie and
her husband fighting with bare hands against the serpents, bitten a score of times
by the angry fangs of the rattlesnakes, clinging to each other in terror,
sinking to the floor in agony as the poisons swelled their tortured limbs, and
overcame them, lying green and blue in death, with rattlesnakes crawling and hissing
over their dead bodies. It is remarkable how few people die from rattlesnake bites,
even when as badly bitten as Jimmerson was. Probably not one adult victim
in a hundred succumbs to the venom. Although mistaken popular belief considers rattlesnake poison
as fatal as the death potion of the borges, Jimmerson had known too many
cases of snake bite to believe his case hopeless. He did not give up
and die, nor did he try to poison his system with whiskey. He
knew that this condition was serious, but he let rest and promagnate. A
potash rubbed into his wounds affect a cure. The bleeding from the lacerated leg
had almost entirely washed out the poison, and there was little swelling. The
pain in his swollen wrist, however, distended almost to bursting, kept him
from sleeping, and the sickly green hue of the bite distressed him, but
it did not kill him. Creamy, careful observer of reptiles though he was,
had never known an actual case of snake bite, and he shared the
popular illusion that the bite of the rattlesnake dooms its victims to death. Hence,
he was certain of the complete success of his revenge, and his gloating
glee was unclouded by even the shadow of a doubt that Marjorie and her husband
had been killed in his death trap. He awaited only the supreme joy of
drinking in the details of his success to feel the exultant thrill of complete victory.
As Creamy sat alone two days after the horrible morning, Jimmerson was limping
slowly toward his cabin. His swollen hand still pained him badly, and there
was a dull ache in his ankle when he put too much weight on it,
but he thought the fresh air would benefit him, Supporting himself with a
cane and leaning heavily on Marjorie at times, he went painfully toward the young
Italian's deserted home. Not once had his suspicions pointed toward Creamy as the author
of the crime, for the guilt of the lunatic cook seemed all too clear.
Besides, he liked Creamy for his genial camaraderie, his joviality and good
humor, and his frank interest in everything that concerned either him or Marjorie.
So intent was the snake fiend on passing the torments of his victims before his
fancy, that he did not hear the knock on his cabin door. His
brain was too busy to heed the message sent by his ears, for he
was feasting on the mental and physical tortures that Jimmerson and Marjorie must have endured
before they lay cold in death on the floor of the cabin, hideously discolored
by the venom of the rattlesnakes by degrees. He became conscious that he was
not alone. Two persons stood before him, and he raised a vengeful spirit
on the story he had been waiting two days to hear. Even when he
gazed at those whom he had consigned to a horrible death, the thought that
they were alive did not permeate his consciousness. The idea of failure had never
entered his mind for even an instant. They were dead, beyond the peradventure
of a doubt, and now their avenging ghosts stood before him. Krimy dropped
to his knees in white terror and crawled behind his chair. He clasped and
unclasped his hands in agony of fear. Sweat poured from his face and bathed
his body. He implored mercy. He screamed for forgiveness. He gibbered like
a frightened ape. Half forgotten words in Italian learned from his mother's knee fell
from his lips. He pleaded and begged for his life, crawling on his
face toward the amazed couple in an endeavor to clasp their knees. As the
meaning of his broken ejaculations was borne in on them. A tremendous loathing and
disgust overcame them. Marjorie clung to her husband, unnerved at the repulsive sight
of the malicious coward groveling on the floor and trying to kiss their feet.
Cramini shrieked and gnawed his hands as he saw the avenging angels of his victims
leave the cabin. It was impossible for the stern hand of the law to
inflict greater punishment on Jack Cremine than his own malice had wrought for him.
To day, he occupies a padded cell in a hospital for the incurably insane.
The End of the Snake Fiend by Farnsworth right