“Look here, it shan’t be said I turned you adrift. You stay here all winter, and I’ll give you a dollar a month for pocket money,” said Mrs. Gunnage, spreading her hands out to emphasize the magnificence of her offer.
“I can’t stay, thank you. I’d rather go. Good morning,” jerked out Nell. Then, stepping across the threshold, she went out to face the future, and all that it might bring.
CHAPTER V
Summoned Home
BRATLEY JUNCTION was a small depot on a branch line, and it was rather a stretch of the imagination to call it a junction at all, since it ended fifteen miles farther on at Camp’s Gulch, while the one little branch was the bit of line running up five miles into the mountains to the Roseneath Mines.
There were mines everywhere in that district. Down on the plains, up in the hoary sides of the towering hills, and tucked away in gloomy cañons the human family dug, delved, and toiled, wresting coal, iron, copper, and even silver, from the covering earth.
Then, when man had done his best, or worst, in upheaving and making desolate what Nature had intended should be wild and beautiful, another sort of man—only sometimes it was a woman—set to work at bringing order out of chaos, and levelling the heaps flung up by the human moles, laid out little fields and fruitful gardens in the sunny hollows of the western hills.
A very different class of settlers these from the dwellers in the middle west, who till their ground, harvest their crops, and thresh their corn by machinery. It was mostly hand work here, and, in many cases, very hard work. No great fortunes were possible, but a living could be wrested from the soil, and a race of boys and girls, self-reliant and clever, were growing up to carve careers for themselves, and to win honourable names among the powerful of the earth.
The Bratley depot was a long wooden shed divided into offices and storerooms, while half a dozen houses, also of wood, clustered near.
The work of the girl telegraph clerk was not heavy, nor yet tremendously important, so it was usually a beginner who was stationed there, and very dull work most of the beginners found it.