THE TESTING OF JANICE DAY
BOOKS BY
HELEN BEECHER LONG
JANICE DAY
THE TESTING OF JANICE DAY
_12mo. Cloth. Illustrated_
_Price per volume, $1.25 net_
SULLY AND KLEINTEICH
NEW YORK
[Illustration: “DID YOU COME TO LOOK FOR ME, TOO?” (_see page 293_)]
THE SECOND “_DO SOMETHING_” BOOK
The Testing of
Janice Day
BY
HELEN BEECHER LONG
AUTHOR OF “JANICE DAY”
Illustrated by
CORINNE TURNER
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
SULLY AND KLEINTEICH
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY
SULLY AND KLEINTEICH
All rights reserved
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. WHAT DADDY HAD WRITTEN 1
II. A VISTA OF NEW POSSIBILITIES 10
III. SOMETHING NEW 20
IV. A VERY CIVIL ENGINEER 29
V. “THE WORLD’S RUN MAD” 38
VI. A RIFT IN HER HAPPINESS 48
VII. THE DESIRE OF AUNT MIRA’S HEART 58
VIII. THE CITY GIRL 67
IX. ANNETTE BOWMAN 79
X. POLKTOWN’S NEW AWAKENING 88
XI. THE BREACH WIDENS 97
XII. “THEM TRIMMINSES” 106
XIII. THE LAWN PARTY 117
XIV. ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON 126
XV. A GRIST OF SMALL HAPPENINGS 136
XVI. LITTLE LOTTIE’S HOME-COMING 148
XVII. AN ERRAND OF MERCY 158
XVIII. THE ELDER’S INDIGNATION 166
XIX. THE FIRST SNOW OF THE SEASON 178
XX. THE BARN DANCE 191
XXI. AFTER THE DANCE 201
XXII. DARK DAYS 207
XXIII. A QUICK CONVALESCENCE 221
XXIV. FINANCIAL TROUBLES 226
XXV. THE ELDER’S AWAKENING 233
XXVI. “A RUN FOR HIS MONEY” 240
XXVII. THE ECHO AGAIN 250
XXVIII. WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN KNOWN BEFORE 271
XXIX. LOOKING FOR JANICE 283
XXX. “JINGLE BELLS!” 294
ILLUSTRATIONS
“Did you come to look for me, too?” (See page 293.) _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Janice leaped out of her car and ran toward the
frightened horse. (See page 79.) 80
The old Elder, towering like a figure of wrath,
scowled at Janice 172
“Go on! Go on!” the Elder was yelling. (See page 243.) 244
THE TESTING OF JANICE DAY
CHAPTER I
WHAT DADDY HAD WRITTEN
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 then cut 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 ever ready 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! What _do_ you 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 the sweeter. 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 to _do 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 picture of “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’s _do something_ spirit 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 could look on this
day for a great surprise to arrive by the _Constance 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!”