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.

If it had done nothing but keep her employed out of doors many hours of the day it would have been well worth the effort, for it kept her from brooding over her troubles, and largely took away the caged feeling which had made her so desperate.  As the fresh green shoots came up through the soil and she counted the long straight rows, she counted also the dimes each one ought to bring to the family purse, and drew a breath of relief.  They would amount to a neat little sum by the end of the season, and by that time maybe some other way would be opened up for her to earn money at home.  True, not all the things they planted came up.  Fully a third of the garden “failed to answer to roll call,” Norman said, but those that did respond to their diligent care amply made up for the failure of the others.