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?"

He lifted his eyebrows. And then, her suspicion clear to him, his
gravity departed the way Terry's dimple had gone and he put back his
head and laughed. Laughed while the girl with deepening color and
darkening eyes looked at him indignantly.

"Think I did that on purpose?" he cried in vast good nature. "That I
was spying on you? That I waited until you started to climb up here
and that then I popped my head up just at the same time? All on
purpose?"

"That's just exactly what I do think!" Terry told him hotly. "You--you
big smarty! Everywhere I go, have you got to keep showing up?"

"I'll tell you something," said Steve. "If I had climbed up here just
to give you a little surprise party; if I had known you were there and
that I could have poked my head up just as you did yours--know what I
would have done?"

"What?" Terry in her curiosity condescended to ask.

"I'd have kissed the prettiest girl I ever saw!" he chuckled. "Honest
to grandma! That's just what I'd have done. As it was, you half
scared me out of my wits; I came as close as you please to going over
backward and breaking my neck."

"Not as close as I please. And as for kissing me, Long Steve Packard,
you just try that on sometime when you want your face slapped good and
hard and a bullet pumped into you besides!"

"Mean it?" grinned Steve.

"I most certainly do," she retorted emphatically.

"Offered merely as information?" he wanted to know. "Or as a dare? Or
an invitation?"

When she did not reply at once but contented herself by putting a deal
of eloquence into a look--which, by the way, had no visible effect upon
his rising good humor--he went on to remark:

"If you just slapped my face it would be worth it. If you just shot me
through the finger-nail or something like that, it would be worth it
still." He examined her critically. "Even if you plugged me square
through the thumb----"

"If you don't know it," she informed him aloofly, "you are trespassing
right now where you are n