“Isn’t it glorious?” she said, looking up at Toppy with her eyes puckered prettily from the sun. “Doesn’t it just make you glad you’re alive?”
“You bet it does!” said Toppy eagerly. He saw his opportunity to continue the conversation and hastened to take advantage. “I never knew air could be as exciting as this. I never felt anything like it. It’s my first experience up here in the woods; I’m an utter stranger around here.”
Having volunteered this information, he waited eagerly. The girl merely nodded.
“Of course. Anybody could see that,” she said simply.
Toppy felt slightly abashed.
“Then you—you’re not a stranger around here?” he asked.
She shook her head, the tassels of her cap and her aureole of light hair tossing gloriously.
“I’m a stranger here in this town,” she said, “but I’ve lived up here in the woods, as you call it, all my life except the two years I was away at school. Not right in the woods, of course, but in small towns around. My father was a timber-estimator before he was hurt, and naturally we had to live close to the woods.”
“Naturally,” agreed Toppy, though he knew nothing about it. He tried to imagine any of the girls he knew back East accepting a stranger as a man and a brother who could be trusted at first hand, and he failed.
“I say,” he said as she stepped away. “Just a moment, please. About this agent-thing. Won’t you please let me go and look for him?” He waved his hands at the six saloons. “You see, there aren’t many places here that a lady can go looking for a man in.”
She hesitated, frowning at the lowly groggeries that constituted the major part of Rail Head’s buildings.
“That’s so,” she said with a smile.
“Of course it is,” said Toppy eagerly. “And the chances are that your man is in one of them, no matter who he is, because that’s about the only place he can be here. You tell me who he is, or what he is, and I’ll go hunt him up.”
“That’s very kind of you.” She hesitated for a moment, then accepted his offer without further parley. “It’s the employment agent of the Cameron Dam Company that I’m looking for. I am to meet him here, according to a letter they sent me, and he is to furnish a team and driver to take me out to the Dam.”
Then she added calmly, “I’m going to keep books out there this Winter.”
CHAPTER III—TOPPY GETS A JOB
Toppy gasped. In the first place, he had not been thinking of her as a “working girl.” None of the girls that he knew belonged to that class. The notion that she, with the childish dimple in her chin and the roses in her cheeks, was a girl who made her own living was hard to assimilate; the idea that she was going out to a camp in the woods—out to Hell Camp—to work was absolutely impossible!
“Keep books?” said Toppy, bewildered. “Do they keep books in a—in a logging-camp?”
It was her turn to look surprised.
“Do you know anything about Cameron Dam?” she asked.
“Nothing,” admitted Toppy. “It’s a logging-camp, though, isn’t it?”
“Rather more than that, as I understand it,” she replied. “They are building a town out there, according to my letter. There are over two hundred people there now. At present they’re doing nothing but logging and building the dam; but they say they’ve found ore out there, and in the Spring the railroad is coming and the town will open up.”
“And—and you’re going to keep books there this Winter?”
She nodded. “They pay well. They’re paying me seventy-five dollars a month and my board.”
“And you don’t know anything about the place?”
“Except what they’ve written in the letter engaging me.”
“And still you’re going out there—to work?”
“Of course,” she said cheerfully. “Seventy-five-dollar jobs aren’t to be picked up every day around here.”
“I see,” said Toppy. He remembered Harvey Duncombe’s champagne bill of the night before and grew thoughtful. He himself had shuddered a short while before, at waking in a bar where there was no mirror, and he had planned to wire Harvey for five hundred to take him back to civilisation. And here was this delicate little girl—as delicate to look upon as any of the petted and pampered girls he knew back East—cheerfully, even eagerly, setting her face toward the wilderness because therein lay a job paying the colossal sum of seventy-five dollars a month! And she was going alone!
A reckless impulse swayed Toppy. He decided not to wire Harvey.
“I see,” he said thoughtfully. “I’ll go find this agent. You’d better wait inside the hotel.”
He crossed the street and systematically began to search through the six saloons. In the third place he found his man shaking dice with an Indian. The agent was a lean, long-nosed individual who wore thick glasses and talked through his nose.
“Yes, I’m the Cameron Dam agent,” he drawled, curiously eying Toppy from head to toe. “Simmons is my name. What can I do for you?”
“I want a job,” said Toppy. “A job out at Hell Camp.”
The agent laughed shortly at the name.
“You’re wise, are you?” he said. “And still you want a job out there? Well, I’m sorry. That load of Bohunks across the street fills me up. I can’t use any more rough labour just at present. I’m looking for a blacksmith’s helper, but I guess that ain’t you.”
“That’s me,” said Toppy resolutely. “That’s the job I want—blacksmith’s helper. That’s my job.”
The agent looked him over with the critical eye of a man skilfully appraising bone and muscle.
“You’re big enough, that’s sure,” he drawled. “You’ve got the shoulders and arms, too, but—let’s see your hands.”
Toppy held up his hands, huge in size, but entirely innocent of callouses or other signs of wear. The agent grinned.
“Soft as a woman’s,” he said scornfully. “When did you ever do any blacksmithing? Long time ago, wasn’t it? Before you were born, I guess.”
Toppy’s right hand shot out and fell upon the agent’s thin arm. Slowly and steadily he squeezed until the man writhed and grimaced with pain.
“Wow! Leggo!” The agent peered over his thick glasses with something like admiration in his eyes. “Say, you’re there with the grip, all right, big fellow. Where’d you get it?”
“Swinging a sledge,” lied Toppy solemnly. “And I’ve come here to get that job.”
Simmons shook his head.
“I can’t do it,” he protested. “If I should send you out and you shouldn’t make good, Reivers would be sore.”
“Who’s this man Reivers?”
The agent’s eyes over his glasses expressed surprise.
“I thought you were wise to Hell Camp?” he said.
“Oh, I’m wise enough,” said Toppy impatiently. “I know what it is. But who’s this Reivers?”
“He’s