28 
CREATURES OF MYSTERY 
she belonged could never, on such occasions, be any too serene. 
The one season of the year when they could always count on 
being raided was the occasion of their annual corn dance. No 
telling when such raiding party might conceive the idea of 
adorning their belts with a scalp or two, in the hope that it 
might enhance their prestige at such festival. 
It so happened on just such an occasion that his mother and 
grandmother were alone. A disturbance on the outside among 
the cattle and the fowls suggested to them both that the Sem- 
inoles were about the premises. Arising silently and peering 
through a hole mortised in the logs for just such emergencies, 
she saw clearly, in the moonlight, a group of Indians surround¬ 
ing their fowl house. Escaping through a trap-door in the 
floor, they stole a march on the Indians and made their way 
into the timbered lands. Helping themselves to all the chickens 
they felt that the occasion might demand, they supplemented 
the results of their raid with some sweet potatoes scratched 
from their cow-pen land, and, as they hovered underneath a 
dense growth of briars, in the jam of a split rail fence, they 
could hear them, in the stillness of the night, as they passed on 
through the cornfield breaking ears of corn. 
Reared in such an atmosphere her utter fearlessness of 
either man or beast can be readily understood. The women of 
her era did not retreat when faced by the dread diamond-back, 
as we shall presently see. They learned that valuable lesson of 
self-reliance and self-protection against all manner of danger. 
To make the life of the women-folk all the more hazardous, 
Uncle Dave’s father was a fisherman as well as a great lover 
of the chase, which kept him away from home most of the 
time. For the reasons stated, he chose to establish residence 
convenient to good hunting ground. Wild turkeys and deer 
were plentiful during his young days, and one can rest assured 
that wherever the country will support an abundance of wild 
life, the rattler will establish himself and get his full share of 
the smaller game. 
This inveterate foe of the Nettles seemed to possess an 
uncanny knowledge of the coming and going of the menfolk 
belonging to the household, and would on occasions take ad- 
