led then. "How many
more accomplishments have you got up your sleeve?"

"Do you consider ordinary cooking an accomplishment?" she returned
lightly.

"I surely do," he replied, "when I remember what an awful mess I made
of it on the start. I certainly did spoil a lot of good grub."

After that they divided the household duties, and Hazel forgot that she
had vowed to make Bill Wagstaff wait on her hand and foot as the only
penalty she could inflict for his misdeeds. It seemed petty when she
considered the matter, and there was nothing petty about Hazel Weir.
If the chance ever offered, she would make him suffer, but in the
meantime there was no use in being childish.

She did not once experience the drear loneliness that had sat on her
like a dead weight the last month before she turned her back on
Granville and its unhappy associations. For one thing, Bill Wagstaff
kept her intellectually on the jump. He was always precipitating an
argument or discussion of some sort, in which she invariably came off
second best. His scope of knowledge astonished her, as did his
language. Bill mixed slang, the colloquialisms of the frontier, and
the terminology of modern scientific thought with quaint impartiality.
There were times when he talked clear over her head. And he was by
turns serious and boyish, with always a saving sense of humor. So that
she was eternally discovering new sides to him.

The other refuge for her was his store of books. Upon the shelves she
found many a treasure-trove--books that she had promised herself to
read some day when she could buy them and had leisure. Roaring Bill
had collected bits of the world's best in poetry and fiction; and last,
but by no means least, the books that stand for evolution and
revolution, philosophy, economics, sociology, and the kindred sciences.
Bill was not orderly. He could put his finger on any book he wanted,
but on his shelves like as not she would find a volume of Haeckel and
another of Bobbie Burns side by side, or a last year's novel snuggling
up against a treatise on social psychology. She could not understand
why a man--a young man--with the intellectual capacity to digest the
stuff that Roaring Bill frequently became immersed in should choose to
bury himself in the wilderness. And once, in an unguarded moment, she
voiced that query. Bill closed a volume of Nietzsche, marking the
place with his forefinger, and looked at her thoughtfully over the book.