Speaker 1: 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