He was carrying a hatchet and an ax, and he looked tired, though it was early in the day.
"I guess Cousin Harriet doesn't know how hard working on the alkali patch is," he murmured softly.

"She isn't like mother:" The boy's head dropped, and a sob escaped him.
"I wish mother hadn't died;" he said chokingly.

"Most every boy has a mother." He tried to stop crying, but it was hard, for he was overworked, and he was only twelve years old.
Six months before this, his mother had died.

Several weeks alter her death, Claude's father had been called East on business; and had left the boy and his younger sisters Rose and Daisy on a ranch owned by Cousin Harriet, several miles from the children's former home.

It had been very hard for the children to part from their father so soon after their mother's death, but he told them that while the business that called him East would take a number of months, yet there was some prospect that their mother's own sister, Aunt Jennie, with her husband and little boy, would come with Claude's father on his return.