The lake ice became so thick that the steamboat could no longer make her trips. Walky Dexter became mail carrier and brought the mail from Middletown every other day.
Janice found the time not at all tedious in its flight. There really was so much to do!
As for real fun—winter sports had been little more than a name to the girl from the Middle West before this winter. The boys had got their bob-sleds out before Thanksgiving. Toboggans were not popular in Poketown, for the coasting-places were too rough. At first Janice was really afraid to join the hilarious parties of boys and girls on some of the slides.
Marty, however, owned a big sled, and she did not want her cousin to lose his good opinion of her. He had declared that she was almost as good as a boy, and Janice successfully hid from him her fear of the sport that really is a royal one.
A favorite slide of the Poketown young people was from the head of the street on which Hopewell Drugg's store was located, down the hill, past the decayed dock on which Janice had first seen little Lottie Drugg, and on across the frozen inlet to the wooded point in which Lottie declared the echo dwelt.
When the whole lake froze solidly, the course of the sleds was continued across its level surface as far as the momentum from the hill would carry the bobs. There was skating here, too; and many were the moonlight nights on which a regular carnival was held at the foot of these hilly streets.
Walky Dexter owned a great sledge, too, and when he attached two span of horses to this, and the roads were even half broken, he could drive parties of Poketown young people all over the county, on moonlight sleigh-rides. Janice was invited to go on several of these, and she did so. Her heart was not always attuned to the hilarity of her companions; but she did not allow herself to become morose, or sad, in public.
Yet the gnawing worriment about her father was in her mind continually.
It was an effort for her to be lively and cheerful when the fate of Mr.
Broxton Day was so uncertain.
Her more thoughtful comrades realized the girl's secret feelings. She was treated with more consideration by the rough boys who were Marty's mates, than were the other girls.
"Say, that Janice girl is all right!" one rough fellow said to Marty Day. "I see her scouring the papers in the readin'-room the other night, and she was lookin' for some news of her father, of course."