THE TESTING OFJANICE DAYCHAPTER IWHAT DADDY HAD WRITTEN
THE TESTING OFJANICE DAY
Bang!bang! bang!
Three loud thumps sounded on the door of Janice Day’s bedchamber and were quickly followed by an eager rattling of the doorknob.
“Janice! I say, Janice, ain’t you ever going to wake up?” came in a strong boyish voice. “Don’t you know this is the day for the great surprise?”
“Oh, Marty, so it is!” replied his cousin, sitting up very suddenly and throwing the covers aside. “How stupid of me to lie abed when the sun is up! I’ll be dressed and downstairs in a jiffy.”
“Thought maybe you didn’t care fer that surprise,” went on the boy dryly. “If you don’t want it, o’ course you can pass it over to me!”
“Why, the idea! I do want it, whatever it is, Marty. Oh, what can it be, do you think?”
“Don’t ask me!” returned the youth, and thencut an odd grimace, which of course nobody saw. “I’ll tell ’em you’ll be down by dinner time,” he added, and then turned and clumped noisily down the narrow farmhouse stairs.
Janice had already hopped out of bed. Now she made her way across the neatly-kept bedchamber to the wide-open window. Her eyes met a most beautiful world, and a new day—a day with all the dew upon it!
She was at the window which overlooked the slope of the hill on which Polktown was built, the sheltered cove below, and the expanse of the broad lake beyond. Janice never wearied of this view—especially at sunrise.
The stern old fortress, far away on a rocky promontory of the other shore of the lake, was decked out with darts of golden sunshine. Gold, too, fresh from the sun’s mint, was scattered along the pastures, woodlands and farms of that western shore as far north and south as her bright eyes could search.
And Janice Day’s eyes were bright. They were the hazel eyes of expectancy, of sympathy, of inquiry. In all her countenance, her eyes attracted and held one’s attention.
Her face was intelligent, her smile confiding; Janice Day usually made friends easily and kept them long. If she had personal troubles she never flaunted them before the world; but she was everready with a sympathetic word or a helping hand for those who needed such comfort.
She was no sluggard. The sun had caught her abed on this morning; but he did not often do so. She was usually the earliest astir in the Day household, and on pleasant mornings often had a run in the woods or fields before breakfast.
Now she shook out her hair, brushed it quickly, did it up in a becoming little “bob” behind for the nonce, then took her “dip” at the chintz-hung washstand, which was the best means for bathing that the old-fashioned house afforded.
In a few minutes she left her room and ran downstairs and out upon the porch as fresh and sweet and clean as any lady from her luxuriously-appointed bathroom. On the porch she almost ran over a short, freckled, red-haired boy who was coming in with a great armful of stove-wood.
“Goodness sakes alive!” cried Janice, her eyes dancing. “You must have been up all night, Marty Day! What is the matter? Toothache? Or is there a circus in town, that you are up so early?”
“Naw—I haven’t been up all night,” drawled her cousin. “I got the start of you for once, didn’t I, Miss Smartie? This is going to be a great day for you, too. I wonder you slept at all,” and the boy chuckled as he staggered into the kitchen with his armful of stove-wood.
“I didn’t sleep well the first part of the night,”confessed Janice, hovering at the kitchen door to talk to him. “I was so eager, Marty, and so curious! Whatdoyou suppose is the surprise Daddy said in his last letter he was sending me?”
“Mebbe he’s captured one of those Mexicans—or a wild Indian,” ventured Marty, grinning, “and is sending it to you.”
“What nonsense!”
“Or one o’ them stinging lizards—or a horned toad, such as he was writing to you about,” suggested the fertile-minded youth.
“Now, Marty!”
“I’ll bet it’s something that’ll make Dad and me work, and we got that addition to the wagon-shed to finish,” and the boy grinned slily as he stooped, piling the wood neatly into the woodbox. There was a change in Marty. Formerly, if he had brought the wood in at all, he would have flung it helter-skelter into the box and run.
“I don’t see,” said Janice thoughtfully, “why you really need that new wagon-shed. And it’s only big enough for one vehicle.”
“Huh!” grunted Marty. “Don’t you like the looks of it?”
“Why—yes; it’s all right. Uncle Jason is a fine carpenter. But I don’t just see the use of it.”
“Mebbe we’re building it to keep that elephant in Uncle Brocky is going to send you—he, he!” chortled Marty, who seemed to be so full of“tickle” that he could not hold the expression of it in.
“Now! I wish you wouldn’t be so ridiculous, Marty Day,” declared Janice, more soberly. “You know Daddy will send me something nice. He says it is something to make me forget my loneliness for him. As though anything could do that!
“For two years, now, he has been down at that hateful mine in Mexico,” continued the girl, with a sigh, and speaking to herself more than to her cousin. “It seems a lifetime. And he says he may have to stay a long time yet.”
“Well, he’s making money,” said Marty bluntly. “Wish I had his chance.”
“Money isn’t everything,” said Janice earnestly. “It does seem as though there ought to be some other man in the mining company who could keep things running down there in Chihuahua, as well as keep peace with both the Constitutionalists and the Federals, and let Daddy take a vacation.
“Oh, Marty! sometimes I feel as though I’d just got to run away down there to see him. Two—long—years!”
“Well, you’d just better not!” ejaculated her cousin. “I’d just like to see you running away and going down there to where all those Mexicans are fighting. Huh! we wouldn’t let you, not much!”
Janice smiled on him suddenly, and if there was a little mist in her eyes, the smile was all thesweeter. It warmed her heart to hear Marty speak in this way, for the boy was not naturally of an affectionate nature.
“All right, Marty!” she exclaimed. “If you don’t want me to go, I’ll stop a while longer.”
“You’d better,” grunted her cousin. “Hi tunket! whatever would Polktown do without you?” he added, with a burst of feeling that was quite amazing, and brought a happy thrill of laughter from Janice Day’s lips.
“You are just as ridiculous as you can be, Marty. Polktown would get along very well without me. Polktown has waked up——”
“And who woke it up?” shot back Marty, belligerently, looking up from the fresh fire he was now kindling in the cookstove.
“Why—why—Mrs. Marvin Petrie and her ‘Clean-Up Day,’ I guess,” laughed Janice, her eyes dancing again. “I know that Polktown began to be Polktown from that very day, and was no longer ‘Poketown,’ as it used to be called.”
Marty shook his head in remembrance of those old times too.
“Don’t know how it all came about, Janice,” he said slowly. “Seems to me things began to happen just about as soon as Uncle Brocky sent you here to live with us. Crackey! We certainly were a slow crowd till you came and began todo something.”
He grinned again broadly. “Walky Dexter says you had the same effect on Polktown as a flea has on a dog. If the flea don’t do nothing else, it keeps the dog stirring!”
“Well, I declare!” exclaimed Janice. “I’m much obliged to Walky, I am sure—comparing me to a flea! I’ll be a bee and sting him next time I get a chance. Here comes Aunt ’Mira. I’m going to help her get breakfast.”
Marty went off, whistling, to help with the chores. His father was already out at the barn. Mrs. Day came heavily into the room—she was almost a giantess of a woman—to find a brightly-burning fire and her niece flitting about, setting the breakfast table.
“I declare for’t, Janice, you are a spry gal,” said the good lady, beginning the preparations for the meal in a capable if not particularly brisk manner. “Ain’t nobody going to get up ahead of you.”
“The sun was ‘up and doing’ before me this morning,” laughed Janice. “And I believe Marty and Uncle Jason were, too. At any rate, they were down before me.”
“It does seem good,” said Aunt ’Mira reflectively, “to come down and find a hot fire in the stove, and water in the bucket. Why, Janice! it never uster be so before you come. I don’t understand it.”
The girl made no reply. For a moment a pictureof “the old Day house” and its inmates arose before her mental vision, as it was when first she had come to Polktown from her mid-western home at Greensboro.
The distress she had felt during the first few days of her sojourn with these relatives, who had been utter strangers to her, was not a pleasant thing to contemplate, even at this distance of time.
Until she had taken Daddy’s advice, and put her young shoulder to the local wheel and pushed, Janice Day had been very unhappy. Then her father’sdo somethingspirit had entered into the young girl and she had determined, whether other folk were lazy and lackadaisical or not, that she would go ahead.
Polktown had changed, as Marty said. Slowly but surely it had progressed, and from a very unkempt, slovenly borough, as it was when Janice Day first stepped ashore from the little lake steamer,Constance Colfax, two years before this bright and beautiful summer morning, it had become a clean, orderly and very attractive New England village, with most people doing their best to make the improvement permanent.
Janice was looking forward to the arrival of the little lake steamer to-day with almost as much expectancy as she felt when she first saw Polktown. Daddy had written from Mexico that she couldlook on this day for a great surprise to arrive by theConstance Colfax.
“The greatest and most lovely surprise in the world,” sighed Janice, looking from the kitchen door as the pork was sizzling in the pan, and Mrs. Day was deftly turning the johnny-cakes, “would be dear Daddy himself coming to Polktown. But, of course, that cannot be for a long, long time.
“I must be patient. I mustn’t look for that. But, goodness me, how curious I am to know just what it is he’s sending me!”