“Where’s the horrible thing gone?” panted Pottersham. “It nearly crushed my legs to powder! Quick, let’s go before it comes back. Where in the world did it come from?”

They took a few steps — but the snake was lying in wait for them! It tripped them all up by gliding in and out of their legs, and then began to coil itself round one of the men’s waists.

Such a shouting and yelling and howling began then! If ever there were frightened men, those four were! No matter where they went, that snake seemed to be there, coiling and uncoiling, gliding, writhing, squeezing!

It was Jo who had set the python on to them, of course. Jo had stayed in the gallery while all the disturbance upstairs had been going on, Beauty draped round her neck. The girl tried in vain to make out what was happening.

And then she had heard a door slam, a bolt shot home, and men’s feet pouring down the stone stairs! She guessed it must be the four whose voices she had heard earlier in the evening, the men who had gone through the passages.

“Beauty! Now it’s your turn to do something,” said Jo, and she pulled the snake off her shoulders. He poured himself down her and flowed on to the ground in one beautiful movement. He glided towards the men, who were now coming out of the gallery. After that, the python had the time of his life. The more the men howled the more excited the big snake became.

Jo was huddled in a corner, laughing till the tears ran down her cheeks. She knew the snake was quite harmless unless he gave one of the men too tight a squeeze. She couldn’t see what was going on, but she could hear.

“Oh dear — there’s another one down!” she thought, as she heard one of the men tripped up by Beauty. “And there goes another! I shall die of laughing. Good old Beauty! He’s never allowed to behave like this in the usual way. He must be enjoying himself!”

At last the men could bear it no more. “Come up to that tower-room!” yelled Pottersham. “I’m not going back through those dark passages with snakes after me. There must be dozens of them here. We’ll be bitten soon!”

Jo laughed out loud. Dozens of them! Well, probably Beauty did seem like a dozen snakes to the bewildered men falling over one another in the dark. But Beauty would not bite — he was not poisonous.

Somehow the men got up into the tower-room, and left the snake behind. Beauty was tired of the game now, and went to Jo when the girl called to him. She draped him round her neck, and listened.

The door up in the tower-room had slammed. Jo slipped up the steps, felt for the door-bolt in the darkness and neatly and quietly pulled it across. Now, unless the men liked to risk going down the peg-rope, which she guessed Bufflo had put up against the wall to rescue the others, they were nicely trapped. And if they did go down the rope they would be sure to find a few people waiting for them at the bottom!