“I’m always silly,” was Billie’s amazing reply, as she sat up and began feeling herself all over carefully. “But it certainly did knock me!”
“Are you all right?” demanded Teddy, watching her as she stretched out first one leg and then the other. “You didn’t break anything, did you?”
“Nothing but my dignity,” she answered, with a giggle that brought an answering grin from the boy. “Teddy,” she demanded, turning to him suddenly, “what did happen, anyway?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, except that we came to the end of that path and jumped off,” answered Teddy, feeling gingerly of his forehead on which Billie could see that a large purple lump was beginning to swell. “If I had had a chance to see what was coming I could have rolled off the sled and pulled you with me. But that turn in the road brought us right on top of it. It’s a sort of precipice, I guess,” he went on to explain, while Billie eyed with sympathy the swelling lump on his forehead. “It’s about fifteen feet high, I think, and if there hadn’t been snow on the ground we surely would have got hurt.”
“If there hadn’t been snow on the ground, we wouldn’t have been sledding,” Billie pointed out, adding, so unexpectedly as to make Teddy jump: “Who hit you?”
“Wh—what?” he gasped. Then seeing that her eyes were fixed on the bump that he was still fingering gingerly, Teddy’s face grew redder than it already was, if such a thing were possible, and his hand fell quickly to his side. “Oh, that!” he said, loftily, as if it were nothing at all. “I guess the runner of the sled gave me a whack just as we dumped over. It doesn’t hurt, though. Not a bit.”
“I bet it does, too,” said Billie, as the boy pulled his cap down tight over the tell-tale spot. “Where is the sled, Teddy?” she added.
“Out there, somewhere, sticking in a drift,” answered the boy. “I didn’t have time to pull it out because I thought you had been killed or something and I had to come to look for you.”
“Thanks,” she laughed at him. Then her face became suddenly serious, and she struggled to her feet, trying to brush off the snow that seemed to cover her from head to foot. “How are we going to get out of this, Teddy?” she asked, looking at him seriously.
“Ask me an easy one,” he returned, his good-looking face extremely anxious and puzzled. “The snow is awfully deep, and I don’t believe we could ever get up to that path again. It would take us a couple of hours to go around, and besides, I’m not sure just how to go.”