Did You See That Snake!?

Last Thursday something kind of scary/interesting happened. It was a beautiful day so all of the windows and patio doors were opened to allow the fresh air into the house. I was working on the computer in my bedroom when one of the older neighbor boys and some of his friends came driving through the backyard on their riding lawn mower. All of a sudden I heard one of the boys cry, "Did you see that snake!?" They stopped the mower to look at the snake, and I saw the boy's mom come running from her yard to our yard. I went out on the deck to see what was going on. I figured they had just found some small snake. Uh, no! They had the tail of the snake and it must have been about 4 feet long (I'm not sure--I'm horrible at estimations). I went and got my camera and went out to the backyard. Everybody had helped the snake to the water--I have no idea if that's the direction it was originally headed, or if it had come out of the pond. Nobody had any idea what kind of snake it was. My neighbor ran to get her phone to try to look up info on the snake while one of the neighborhood dogs kept the snake in the water while constantly barking at it, and getting too close and struck at twice, but didn't get bit. I took some pics of the snake and tried to find out more info about it, but couldn't come to anything conclusive. We were wishing that the neighbor's husband was home because he is the assistant director of our city's zoo and he would probably have know what type of snake it was. We all concluded it was either some kind of water snake, or corn snake. I don't know where it ended up, but I hope it just kept moving away from us. I'm sure we'll be seeing more snakes this summer, I just pray we don't find one in our house. If Roger isn't home to take care of a snake that we might find, whether or not it's harmless (because I probably wouldn't know for sure) that snake will get a whooping by me and a shovel. Sorry snake.