She chanced to be reflecting on this subject on a Saturday afternoon near the end of the month Hopewell had allowed to Joe Bodley to find the rest of the purchase price for the violin. She had been up to the church vestry to attend a meeting of her Girls' Guild. As she passed the Public Library this thought came to her:
"I'll go in and look in the encyclopaedia. That ought to tell about old violins."
She looked up Cremona and read about its wonderful violins made in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries by the Amati family and by Antonio Stradivari and Josef Guarnerius. It did not seem possible that Hopewell's instrument could be one of these beautifully wrought violins of the masters; yet——
"Who knows?" sighed Janice. "You read about such instruments coming to light in such queer places. And Hopewell's fiddle looks awfully old. From all accounts his father must have been a musician of some importance, despite the fact that he was thought little of in Polktown by either his wife or other people. Mr. Drugg might have owned one of these famous violins—not one of the most ancient, perhaps—and told nobody here about it. Why! the ordinary Polktownite would think just as much of a two-dollar-and-a-half fiddle as of a real Stradivarius or an Amati."
While she was at the task, Janice took some notes of what she read. While she was about this, Walky Dexter, who brought the mail over from Middletown, daily, came in with the usual bundle of papers for the reading desk, and the girl in charge that afternoon hastened to put the papers in the files.
Major Price had presented the library with a year's subscription to a
New York daily. Janice or Marty always found time to scan each page of
that paper for Mexican news—especially for news of the brigand chief,
Juan Dicampa.
She went to the reading desk after closing and returning the encyclopaedia to its proper shelf, and spread the New York paper before her. This day she had not to search for mention of her father's friend, the Zapatist chief. Right in front of her eyes, at the top of the very first column, were these headlines: