"Uh, say, Trigger!"
25
Trigger gasped. Her eyes flew open. She made a convulsive effort to vanish beneath the surface of the creek. Being flat on the sand as it was, that didn't work. So she stopped splashing about and made rapid covering-up motions here and there instead.
"You've got a nerve!" she snapped as her breath came back. "Beat it! Fast!"
Ole bashful Quillan, standing on the bank fifteen feet above her, looked hurt. He also looked.
"Look!" he said plaintively. "I just came over to make sure you were all right—wild animals around! I wasn't studying the color scheme."
"Beat it! At once!"
Quillan inhaled with apparent difficulty.
"Though now it's been mentioned," he went on, speaking rapidly and unevenly, "there is all that brown and that sort of pink and that lovely white." He was getting more enthusiastic by the moment; Trigger became afraid he would fall off the bank and land in the creek beside her. "And the—ooh-ummh!—wet red hair and the freckles!" he rattled along, his eyes starting out of his head. "And the lovely—"
"Quillan!" she yelled. "Please!"