Just where the tree had fallen the creek-bed was rocky and uneven; the water eddied and whirled and plunged noisily into its pools. Terry, clambering up from her side of the big log, heard only the shouting of the brook. She grasped the dead branches, pulled herself up, slipped a little, got a new foothold; Terry's head, her face flushed rosily, her eyes never brighter, popped up on one side of the log just in time with the tick of her destiny's clock.
[Illustration: Terry's head, her face flushed rosily, her eyes never brighter,
popped up on one side of the log.]
That is to say just as Steve Packard, climbing up from the other side, thrust his head up above the top. An astonished grunt from Steve who in the first start of the encounter came close to falling backward; a little choking ejaculation from Terry whose eyes widened wonderfully—and the two of them settled silently into their places on the cedar and stared at each other. Some three or four feet only lay between the brim of Steve's hat and Terry's upturned nose.
"Well?" demanded Terry stiffly.
"Well?" countered Steve.
He regarded her very gravely. He had never had a girl materialize this way out of space and his own thoughts. This sudden confronting savored of the supernatural; for the moment it set him aback and he was content to stare wonderingly into the sweet gray eyes so near his own and to take note of the curve of her lips, the redness of them, the dimple which, though departed now and, he felt, in hiding, had left a hint of itself behind in its hasty flight.
"If there's one thing I hate worse than a potato-bug," said Terry, "it's a fresh guy! Think you're funny, don't you?"
"Fresh? Funny?"