“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?”