t Jack
built."

"That's a lie!" she flashed stormily through her chattering teeth.

"Well, we'll see," he answered cheerfully. "Get up here close to the
fire and take off those wet things while I put away the horses."

And with that he went out, whistling.

CHAPTER X

A LITTLE PERSONAL HISTORY

Hazel discarded the wet coat, and, drawing a chair up to the fire, took
off her sopping footgear and toasted her bare feet at the blaze. Her
clothing was also wet, and she wondered pettishly how in the world she
was going to manage with only the garments on her back--and those dirty
and torn from hacking through the brush for a matter of two weeks.
According to her standards, that was roughing it with a vengeance. But
presently she gave over thinking of her plight. The fire warmed her,
and, with the chill gone from her body, she bestowed a curious glance
on her surroundings.

Her experience of homes embraced only homes of two sorts--the
middle-class, conventional sort to which she had been accustomed, and
the few poorly furnished frontier dwellings she had entered since
coming to the hinterlands of British Columbia. She had a vague
impression that any dwelling occupied exclusively by a man must of
necessity be dirty, disordered, and cheerless. But she had never seen
a room such as the one she now found herself in. It conformed to none
of her preconceived ideas.

There was furniture of a sort unknown to her, tables and chairs
fashioned by hand with infinite labor and rude skill, massive in
structure, upholstered with the skins of wild beasts common to the
region. Upon the walls hung pictures, dainty black-and-white prints,
and a water color or two. And between the pictures were nailed heads
of mountain sheep and goat, the antlers of deer and caribou. Above
the fireplace spread the huge shovel horns of a moose, bearing across
the prongs a shotgun and fishing rods. The center of the
floor--itself, as she could see, of hand-smoothed logs--was lightened
with a great black and red and yellow rug of curious weave. Covering
up the bare surface surrounding it were bearskins, black and brown.
Her feet rested in the fur of a monster silvertip, fur thicker and
softer than the pile of any carpet ever fabricated by man. All around
the walls ran shelves filled with books. A guitar stood in one corner,
a mandolin in another. The room was all of sixteen by twenty feet, and
it was filled with trophies of the wild--