The huge gray thing came at her.  Into the rushing of her ears broke thudding sounds.  The thing leaped up.  A horrible petrifaction suddenly made stone of Carley.  Then she saw a gray mantlelike object cast aside to disclose the dark form of a man.  Glenn!

“Carley, dog-gone it!  You don’t scare worth a cent,” he laughingly complained.

She collapsed into his arms.  The liberating shock was as great as had been her terror.  She began to tremble violently.  Her hands got back a sense of strength to clutch.  Heart and blood seemed released from that ice-banded vise.

“Say, I believe you were scared,” went on Glenn, bending over her.

“Scar-ed!” she gasped.  “Oh—­there’s no word—­to tell—­what I was!”

Flo came running back, giggling with joy.  “Glenn, she shore took you for a bear.  Why, I felt her go stiff as a post! . . .  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Carley, now how do you like the wild and woolly?”

“Oh!  You put up a trick on me!” ejaculated Carley.  “Glenn, how could you? . . .  Such a terrible trick!  I wouldn’t have minded something reasonable.  But that!  Oh, I’ll never forgive you!”

Glenn showed remorse, and kissed her before Flo in a way that made some little amends.  “Maybe I overdid it,” he said.  “But I thought you’d have a momentary start, you know, enough to make you yell, and then you’d see through it.  I only had a sheepskin over my shoulders as I crawled on hands and knees.”

“Glenn, for me you were a prehistoric monster—­a dinosaur, or something,” replied Carley.

It developed, upon their return to the campfire circle, that everybody had been in the joke; and they all derived hearty enjoyment from it.

“Reckon that makes you one of us,” said Hutter, genially.  “We’ve all had our scares.”

Carley wondered if she were not so constituted that such trickery alienated her.  Deep in her heart she resented being made to show her cowardice.  But then she realized that no one had really seen any evidence of her state.  It was fun to them.

Soon after this incident Hutter sounded what he called the roll-call for bed.  Following Flo’s instructions, Carley sat on their bed, pulled off her boots, folded coat and sweater at her head, and slid down under the blankets.  How strange and hard a bed!  Yet Carley had the most delicious sense of relief and rest she had ever experienced.  She straightened out on her back with a feeling that she had never before appreciated the luxury of lying down.

Flo cuddled up to her in quite sisterly fashion, saying:  “Now don’t cover your head.  If it rains I’ll wake and pull up the tarp.  Good night, Carley.”  And almost immediately she seemed to fall asleep.