oward Perkins, traveling
salesman for Harrington & Bush. She had met him several times in the
company offices. She was anything save joyful at the meeting, but
after the first unwelcome surprise she reflected that it was scarcely
strange that a link in her past life should turn up here, for she knew
that in the very nature of things a firm manufacturing agricultural
implements would have its men drumming up trade on the very edge of the
frontier.

Mr. Perkins was tolerably young, good looking, talkative, apparently
glad to meet some one from home. He joined her on the porch for a
minute when the meal was over. And he succeeded in putting Hazel
unqualifiedly at her ease so far as he was concerned. If he had heard
any Granville gossip, if he knew why she had left Granville, it
evidently cut no figure with him. As a consequence, while she was
simply polite and negatively friendly, deep in her heart Hazel felt a
pleasant reaction from the disagreeable things for which Granville
stood; and, though she nursed both resentment and distrust against men
in general, it did not seem to apply to Mr. Perkins. Anyway, he was
here to-day, and on the morrow he would be gone.

Being a healthy, normal young person, Hazel enjoyed his company without
being fully aware of the fact. So much for natural gregariousness.
Furthermore, Mr. Perkins in his business had been pretty much
everywhere on the North American continent, and he knew how to set
forth his various experiences. Most women would have found him
interesting, particularly in a community isolated as Cariboo Meadows,
where tailored clothes and starched collars seemed unknown, and every
man was his own barber--at infrequent intervals.

So Hazel found it quite natural to be chatting with him on the Briggs'
porch when her school work ended at three-thirty in the afternoon. It
transpired that Mr. Perkins, like herself, had an appreciation of the
scenic beauties, and also the picturesque phases of life as it ran in
the Cariboo country. They talked of many things, discussed life in a
city as compared with existence in the wild, and were agreed that both
had desirable features--and drawbacks. Finally Mr. Perkins proposed a
walk up on a three-hundred-foot knoll that sloped from the back door,
so to speak, of Cariboo Meadows. Hazel got her hat, and they set out.
She had climbed that hill by herself, and she knew that it commanded a
great sweep of the rolling land to the west.