“I heard what you said, Ken, dear, honestly I did! You were saying it would take two dollars to buy a sack of dry beans, and another two dollars for potatoes that we need right now. That’s five dollars out of this month’s interest, and there’ll be another for extra things like salt and sugar. It doesn’t look as though there’d be enough to buy a coat for Jimmy-Boy, does it? And the cold winter will soon be here.”
The brow of the lad was wrinkled, and unconsciously he tapped his pencil on the slate as he thought. Then suddenly he rose with a look of determination that was so like his father’s. “Dix,” he said, “I’m not going to school any longer. I’m going to work, that’s what. I’m fourteen years of age now, and the law lets you stop then.”
The girl also had risen, and, placing a hand lovingly on the arm of her brother, she said, “Kenny, you know that your heart’s set on going away to school some day to learn how to make roads and bridges and things like that.”
Ken nodded. “I know,” he said. “Maybe later I can go to school again, but just now we need money.”
The lad had been twelve years of age the year that the State road had crossed the Sierra Nevada Mountains. He had been a frequent and fascinated visitor at the camp where the civil engineer lived, and Frederick Edrington, isolated from people of his own kind, had really enjoyed the companionship of the intelligent boy, and had taught him many things, leaving in the heart of the lad an unwavering ambition some day to become a civil engineer.
When the camp of the road-builders had been moved farther and farther west, Ken had managed to visit his friend until the distance became too great, and at last he had to say good-by to Frederick Edrington, who had been a greater influence for good in the boy’s life than either of them at that time realized.
Now and then a letter or a picture postcard had come from the engineer, who had been promoted to a government inspecting-position which took him to many out-of-the-way places. One of Ken’s dearest desires was to meet again this friend whom he so admired.
“Don’t stop going to school yet, Ken, dear,” Dixie was saying. “Let’s wait till we get close up to trouble’s stone wall, and then, if we can’t find an opening in it, we’ll turn back and do something else.” That had been a favorite saying of Grandmother Piggins. “Trouble ofttimes seems like a stone wall ahead, but when you get right close up to it you find there’s an opening with sunshine and gardens just beyond.”
Ken whirled about and caught his sister’s hands. “I’ll make a bargain, Dix,” he said. “If you’ll promise not to grieve about Carol, I’ll promise to keep on going to school until we come to the stone wall and find there isn’t an opening.”
Dixie smiled. “I ought to be glad,” she said, “because Carol is to have so nice a home.” Then she added wistfully, “I’m going to be glad, honest I am, just as soon as I get over being lonesome.”