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.”