uillan--being bashful! Well now!

And that did it. She could feel herself relaxing, slipping down and
away, drifting down through her mind ... farther ... deeper ... toward
the tiny voice that spoke in such a strange language and still was
becoming daily more comprehensible.

"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!"

Quillan checked himself. "Uh!" he said. He drew a deep breath. The wild
look faded. Sanity appeared to return. "Well, it's the truth about those
wild animals! Some sort of large, uncouth critter was observed just now
ducking into the forest at the upper end of the valley!"

Trigger darted a glance along the bank. Her clothes were forty feet
away, just beside the water.

"I'm observing some sort of large, uncouth critter right here!" she said
coldly. "What's worse, it's observing me. Turn around!"

Quillan sighed. "You're a hard woman, Argee," he said. But he turned. He
was carrying a holstered gun, as a matter of fact; but he usually did
that nowadays anyway. "This thing," he went on, "is supposed to have a
head like a bat, three feet across. It flies."

"Very interesting," Trigger told him. She decided he wasn't going to
turn around again. "So now I'll just get into my clothes, and then--"

It came quietly out of the trees around the upper bend of the creek
sixty feet away. It had a head like a bat, and was blue on top and
yellow below. Its fl