So the days wore on. Each week the sun shone with more strength; the sap rose in the forests, and the millions of leaf buds grew and swelled in token that summer was coming.
Meanwhile Nell toiled steadily for her adopted family, so content with the love that was her daily and hourly reward, as never to guess or to speculate concerning the future, and what it might bring her.
CHAPTER XXVII
An Early Customer
IT was the last day of June, and the promise for July was for fine weather and sunshine.
Camp’s Gulch was in a state of bustle and activity, which bespoke great business activity. There was a row of ugly little huts for miners on the side of the depot farthest from the Settlement road. Some of the miners had their wives and children with them now, and this increase of population necessitated a school-house here as well as at the Settlement.
So a wooden shed, brown and unpainted, with a shingled roof, had been hastily run up, and Gertrude had applied for and obtained the post of teacher. She had fortunately taken her certificate at Nine Springs, before becoming a telegraph operator, so there had been no difficulty regarding her fitness for the post, and as she was on the spot, everyone regarded her as the most suitable for the position.
Mrs. Lorimer had slipped out of life during the first days of March. Her sufferings had been so great that those who watched her could feel only thankfulness that the hour of her release had come.
Her children mourned her truly, but in the months of her helplessness they had learned to do without her, and so they could not be said to miss her as much as if she had been cut down in rude health.
With the coming of more women to Camp’s Gulch, some parts of Nell’s business had grown less, for where men had their wives to keep house for them, they did not need to go and buy cooked food. But she had made up the lack with other things, until her little kitchen had come to look like a regular store.