“Stay, Sweetheart, stay!
Stay, till I ketch thee!”
panted Olive, as she neared the top, making the sand-dunes ring with the merry hail of an old song.
“Hey ding a ding a ding!
This ketching is a pretty thing!”
“Is it, though?” sarcastically inquired a voice. “I don’t think it’s a ‘very pretty thing!’” in the sourest of masculine voices that ever planted a sting in a girlish paradise. “Oh, jiggaroo! I don’t think ‘ketching’s’ pretty: I’m caught—an’ I don’t like it!”
Both girls jumped. The grumbling shout came from a sandy shoulder of the peak on which they were standing, a peak whose shoulder-blade stood out, clad in dark, olive-green basswood. Was it a goblin voice?
Beneath one glossy shrub showed a yellow-brown mound—a huddled, abject mound—a shade lighter in hue than their own ceremonial dresses.
Under the waning gold of the sunset it looked jaundiced. Jaundiced, truly, yellow-green with despair, if tones suggest color, and surly—the surliest ever—was the renewed shout that came from it, flung up from the olive-green clump of basswood into the teeth of the girls, the lips that launched the grumble being hidden.
“Oh, guree!” so it sullenly ran. “If that isn’t like girls! If they must sing on a trail, why can’t they sing something sensible! ‘Ketching!’ ‘Sweetheart!’ Stuff to make a fellow sick—sicker’n he is already! Oh-h-h! Ouch!”