“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.”