I not only had the natural appetite of a healthy young woman but, as I had found I was going to have a baby, I craved additional food for the new life. At first, the news of my condition seemed to make things better. I wrote to Father Doe and he replied that his lumber mill had just burned down in Oshkosh. He would wind up his affairs in Oshkosh and move the family to Central. He wanted to be near his grandchild and he would straighten out Harvey’s affairs. Harvey’s affairs certainly were tangled although he kept the whole truth from his father and from me for a long time. It turned out that besides the money he owed the First National Bank, a sum that later, with accumulating interest, amounted to over a thousand dollars, he had also secretly been employing a Peter Richardson to repair the badly timbered shaft of the Fourth of July that Harvey had botched. Peter Richardson had never been paid for his work nor for a new hoist he had installed and in May, 1878, obtained a judgment against Harvey for $485 plus court costs. The Newell Brothers also had a $48 bill against him for grain and hay for our team, run up before we had had to sell the horses. He was afraid to say anything about these bills to his father. I was becoming desperate. My own family were too poor to appeal to and I was far too proud to want anyone in Oshkosh except Father Doe to guess at the truth of how my marriage had turned out. I turned more and more to Jake for comfort and every kind of sustenance. Harvey began to spend his time in bars, not that he drank much, just a few beers. But hanging around and talking to the customers gave him ample opportunity to feel sorry for himself and to tell people his troubles. I hated him for his weakness—I always detested any kind of blubbering. Soon we were quarreling regularly. Although he got a few odd jobs and sometimes earned enough money for food, it was never enough to pay our rent and we were forced to move about a lot in Blackhawk and Central. That year and the next were two of the most discouraging I ever spent. I was constantly blue and dejected in spirit and frightened for the future of my baby. To try to help out, I put on miner’s clothes and attempted to do some work starting to sink a shaft on the Troy Lode next to the English-Kansas that Harvey had bought from the Hinds brothers. I really was in no condition to do this work but I knew that many of the mines on Quartz Hill, very close by, were steady lucrative producers and our claim seemed the one hope. “Hello, there!” I heard one day, called out from a teamster driving an ore wagon down from the Patch mines up above. “What do you think you’re doing? You’re Baby Doe, aren’t you?”