But the rutty, dusty road showed that it had been rutty and muddy in the earlier spring. The flagstones of the sidewalks were broken, and the walks themselves ill kept. The gutters were overgrown with gra.s.s and weeds. Before the shops the undefended tree trunks were gnawed into grotesque patterns by the farmers' hungry beasts. Hardware was at a premium in Poketown, for a dozen gates along the line were hung with leather hinges, and bits of rope had taken the places of the original latches.

From the water, however, even on closer view, the hillside village made a pretty picture. Near the wharf it was not so romantic, as Janice Day realized, when the coughing, wheezy steamboat came close in.

There were decrepit boats drawn up on the narrow beach; there were several decaying shacks bordering on the dock itself; and along the stringpiece of the wharf roosted a row of "humans" that were the opposite of ornamental. The quick eye of Janice Day caught sight of this row of nondescripts.

"Goodness me, Mrs. Scattergood!" she exclaimed, turning to the old lady who had been in receipt of her confidences. "Is the almshouse near Poketown?"

"There's a poorfarm, child; but there ain't n.o.body on it but a few old folks an' some orphans. We ain't poor here--not pauper poor. But, goodness me! you mean them men a-settin' there? Why, they ain't poor--no, no, child. I don't suppose there's a man there that don't own his own house. There's Mel Parraday, who owns the _ho_-tel; and Lem Pinney that owns stock in this very steamboat comp'ny; and Walkworthy Dexter--Walky's done expressin' and stage-drivin' since before my 'Rill come here to Poketown to teach."

"But--but they look so ragged and unshaven," gasped Janice.

"Pshaw! they ain't proud, I reckon," cackled the old lady, gathering up her knitting and dropping it into the beaded bag, which she shut with a snap.

"But isn't there anybody proud _of_ them?" queried Janice. "Haven't they mothers--or wives--or sisters?"

The old lady stared at her. Then she made a sudden clicking in her throat that might have been a chuckle. "I declare for't, child!" she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "I dunno as many of us in these parts _air_ proud of our men folks."

Just then the steamboat's bow b.u.mped the wharf. The jar scarcely seemed to awaken the languid line of Poketownites ranged along the other side.

The only busy person in sight was the employee of the steamboat company who caught the loop of the hawser thrown him, and dropped it over a pile. The rest of the men just raised their heads and stared, chewing reflectively on either tobacco or straws, until the plank was dropped and the deckhands began trundling the freight and baggage ash.o.r.e.

There were two or three commercial drummers beside Mrs. Scattergood and Janice, who disembarked on this dock. Mrs. Scattergood bade the girl from the West a brisk good-bye and went directly up the dock, evidently expecting n.o.body to meet her at this time of day. A lanky man, with grizzled brows and untrimmed beard, got up slowly from the stringpiece of the wharf and slouched forward to meet Janice Day.

"I reckon you be Broxton's gal, eh?" he queried, his eyes twinkling not unkindly. "Ye sort er favor him--an' he favored his mother in more ways than one. You're Janice Day?"

"Oh, yes indeed! And you're my Uncle Jason?" cried the girl, impulsively seizing Mr. Day's hand. There was nothing about this man that at all reminded Janice of her father; yet the thought of their really being so closely related to each other was comforting. "I'm so glad to see you,"

she continued. "I hope you'll like me, Uncle Jason--and I hope Aunt Almira will like me. And there is a cousin, too, isn't there--a boy?

Dear me! I've been looking forward to meeting you all ever since I left Greensboro, and been wondering what sort of people you would be."

"Wal," drawled Uncle Jason, rather staggered by the way Janice "ran on,"

"we reckon on makin' ye comferble. Looks like we'd have ye with us some spell, too. Broxton writ me that he didn't know how long he'd be gone--down there in Mexico."

"No. Poor Daddy couldn't tell. The business must be 'tended to, I s'pose----"

"Right crazy of him to go there," grunted Uncle Jason. "May git shot any minute. Ain't _no_ money wuth that, I don't believe."

This rather tactless speech made the girl suddenly look grave; but it did not quench her vivacity. She was staring about the dock, interested in everything she saw, when Uncle Jason drawled:

"I s'pose ye got a trunk, Janice?"

"Oh, yes. Here is the check," and she began to skirmish in her purse.

"Wal! there ain't no hurry. Marty'll come down by-me-by with the wheelbarrer and git it for ye."

"But my goodness!" exclaimed the girl from Greensboro. "I haven't anything fit to put on in this bag; everything got rumpled so aboard the train. I'll want to change just as soon as I get to the house, Uncle."

"Wal!" Uncle Jason was staggered. He had given up thinking quickly years before. This was an emergency that floored him.

"Why! isn't that the expressman there? And can't he take my trunk right up to the house?" continued the girl.

"Ya-as; that's Walky Dexter," admitted Mr. Day.

A stout, red-faced man was backing a raw-boned nag in front of a farm wagon, down upon the wharf and toward a little heap of baggage that had been run ash.o.r.e from the lower deck of the _Constance Colfax_. Janice, still lugging her suitcase, shot up the dock toward the expressman, leaving Jason, slack-jawed and well-nigh breathless.

"Jefers-pelters! What a flyaway critter she is!" the man muttered. "I don't see whatever we're a-goin' to do with _her_."

Meanwhile Janice got Mr. Dexter's attention immediately. "There's my trunk right there, Mr. Dexter," she cried. "And here's the check. You see it--the brown trunk with the bra.s.s corners?"

"I see it, Miss. All right. I'll git it up to Jason's some time this arternoon."

"Oh, Mr. Dexter!" she cried, shaking her head at him, but smiling, too.

"That will not do at all! I want to unpack it at once. I need some of the things in it, for I've been traveling two days. Can't you take it on your first load?"

"Wa-al--I might," confessed Dexter, looking her over with a quizzical smile. "But us'ally the Days ain't in no hurry."

"Then this is one Day who _is_ in a hurry," she said, briefly. "What is your charge for delivering the trunk, sir?"

"Oh--'bout a quarter, Miss. And gimme that suitcase, too. 'Twon't cost ye no more, and I'll git 'em there before Jason and you reach the house.

Poketown is a purty slow old place, Miss," the man added, with a wink and a chuckle, "but I kin see the _days_ are going to move faster, now you have arove in town. Don't you fear; your trunk'll be there--'nless Josephus, here, busts a leg!"

Quite stunned, Uncle Jason had not moved from his tracks. "Now we're all right, sir," said the girl, cheerily, taking his arm and by her very touch seeming to galvanize a little life into his scarecrow figure.

"Shall we go home?"

"Eh? Wal! Ef ye say so, Janice," replied Mr. Day, weakly.

They started up the main street of Poketown, Janice accommodating her step to that of her uncle. Mr. Day was not one given to idle chatter; but the girl did not notice his silence in her interest in all she saw.

It was a beautiful, shady way, with the hill not too steep for comfort.

And some of the dwellings set in the midst of their terraced old lawns, were so beautiful! It was the beauty of age, however; there did not seem to be a single _new_ thing in Poketown.

Even the scant display of goods in the shop windows had lain there until they were dust-covered, sun-burned, and flyspecked. The signs over the store doors were tarnished.

They came to the lane that led up the hill away from High Street, and on which Uncle Jason said he lived. An almost illegible sign at the corner announced it to be "Hillside Avenue." There were not two fences ab.u.t.ting upon the lane that were set in line, while the sidewalks were narrow or broad, according to the taste of the several owners of property along the way.

The beautiful old trees were everywhere, however; only some of them needed tr.i.m.m.i.n.g badly, and many overhung the roofs, their dripping branches having rotted the shingles and given life to great patches of green moss. There was a sogginess to the gra.s.s-grown yards that seemed unhealthful. There were several, picturesque, old wells, with ma.s.sive sweeps and oaken buckets--quaint breeders of typhoid germs--which showed that the physicians of Poketown had not properly educated their patients to modern sanitary ideas.

Altogether the village in which her father had been born and bred was a dead-and-alive, do-nothing place, and its beauty, for Janice Day, faded before she was halfway up the hill to her uncle's house.

CHAPTER III

"IT JEST RATTLES"

Almira Day was a good-hearted woman. It was not in her to treat her husband's niece otherwise than kindly, despite her threat to the contrary when Jason left the old Day house to meet Janice at the steamboat dock.

She stood smiling in the doorway--a large, pink, lymphatic woman, as shapeless as a half-filled meal-sack with a string tied around its middle, quite as untidy as her husband in dress, but with clean skin and a wholesome look.