THE sunlight, streaming straight down through wide rifts in the scant foliage of the tall, short-branched sweet gums, smote fiercely upon the stagnant pool, blotching its opaque, wine-colored surface with numberless sharply defined patches of translucent amber. The pool was of oval shape and of small area. A slender gum, uprooted years before by some irresistible equinoctial blast, had fallen clear across it, and, stretching from shore to shore like a causeway or a half-submerged bridge, divided it into two completely dissevered parts. Close around its soft, soggy edge crowded the trees—a few lofty, moss-bearded cypresses, spared by the lumbermen because of some saving defect of shape, straight sweet gums of every age and size, some of them taller than the tallest of the cypresses but dead or dying at their tops. Their column-like trunks soared upward out of a dense thicket of scrubby, close-growing bushes whose small leaves were of so pale a shade of green as to appear almost silver where the light fell obliquely upon them. In front of this solid wall of frondage and springing from the dark, scum-
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The Way of a Serpent
