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Page 70
"I shall begin teaching you how to give it just as soon as he rallies a
little more," the nurse promised, "You will have to be both hands and
feet for him for many a week to come, poor boy, and feet always. It is
good that you are so strong and untiring yourself."
For awhile Mary went about feeling like a visitor, since there was
little for her to do either in kitchen or sick-room. Jack had not yet
reached the stage when he needed amusement. He seemed glad that she was
home, and his eyes followed her wistfully about the room, but he did not
attempt to talk much. Sometimes the emptiness of the hours palled on her
till she felt that she could not endure it. She wrote long letters to
Joyce and Betty and all the school-girls with whom she wanted to keep up
a correspondence. She mended everything she could find that needed
mending, and she spent many hours telling her mother all that had
happened in her absence. But for once in her life her usual resources
failed her.
The little mining camp of Lone-Rock was high up in the hills, so that
April there was not like the Aprils she had known at the Wigwam. There
were still patches of snow under the pine trees above the camp. But the
stir of spring was in the air, and every afternoon, while Mrs. Ware was
resting, Mary slipped away for a long walk. Sometimes she would
scramble up the hill-side to the great over-hanging rock which gave the
place its name, and sit looking down at the tiny village below. It was
just a cluster of miners' shacks, most of them inhabited by Mexicans.
There were the Company's stores and the post-office, and away at the
farther end of the one street were the houses of the few American
families who had found their way to Lone-Rock, either on account of the
mines or the healthful climate of the pine-covered hills. She could
distinguish the roof of their own cottage among them, and the chimney of
the little, unpainted school-house.
She wondered what the outcome of all their troubles was to be. She
couldn't go on in this aimless way, day after day. She must find
something to do that would pay her a salary, and it must be something
that she could do at home, where she would be needed sorely as soon as
the nurse left. Then she would go over and over the same little round.
She might teach. She knew that she could pass the examination for a
license, but the school was already supplied with a competent teacher,
of many years' experience, whom the trustees would undoubtedly prefer to
a seventeen year old girl just fresh from school herself.
There was stenography--that was something she could master by herself,
and at home, but there was already a stenographer in the Company office,
and there was no other place for one in Lone-Rock. Round and round she
went like one in a treadmill, always to come back to the starting point,
that there was nothing she could do in Lone-Rock to earn money, and she
_must_ earn some, and she could not go away from home. Sometimes the
hopelessness of the situation gave her a wild caged feeling, as if she
must beat herself against the bars of circumstance and make them give
way for her pent-up forces to find an outlet.
The only thing that Mrs. Ware could suggest was that they might
advertise in the Phoenix papers for summer boarders. She had been told
that the year before several camping parties had pitched tents near
Lone-Rock, and they had said that if there were a good boarding place in
the village it could be filled to overflowing with a desirable class of
guests.
So Mary spent an evening, pencil in hand, calculating the probable
expenses and income from such a venture. They could not go into it on a
large scale, the house was too small. The cost of living was high in
Lone-Rock, and the market limited to the canned goods on the shelves of
the Company's stores. Her careful figuring proved that there would be
so little profit in the undertaking that it would not pay to try. But
the evening was not lost. It suggested the vegetable garden, which with
Norman's help she proceeded to start the very next morning.
Plain spading in unbroken sod is not exactly what a boy of thirteen
would call sport, and Norman started at the task with little enthusiasm.
But Mary, following vigorously in his wake with hoe and rake, spurred
him on with visions of the good things they should have to eat and the
fortune they should make selling fresh garden stuff to the summer
campers, till he caught some of her indomitable spirit, and really grew
interested in the work. Mary confined her energies to the vegetables
which she knew would grow in that locality, and which would be sure to
find a ready sale, but Norman gradually enlarged the borders to make
experiments of his own, till all the lot back of the house was a well
tilled garden.
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