But to expect Janice Day to think of anything that morning but the promised present from Daddy, was to demand the impossible. She helped about the house as usual, singing blithely the while; but her active thought was with the Constance Colfax blundering up the lake from The Landing toward the Polktown dock.
The hammers of Uncle Jason and Marty rang vigorously until about nine o’clock. The new shed which had so puzzled Janice was finished. Mr. Day went off to the cornfield while Marty slipped away, probably to meet Mr. Bowman and “see about that job,” as he had told Janice.
Marty was a good deal like the majority of human beings. He did not care to do the tasks right at his hand, but wanted something that looked better and bigger in the distance. He disliked school—or had done so until Nelson Haley came to Polktown to teach; and now that school was not in session he did not want to help his father run their small farm.
There was a halo of romance, in fact, about any trade that took him away from home. He often told Janice he wished he was like “Uncle Brocky,” and could “go ’way off to a mine in Mexico, or any old place!”
“This doing chores, and going to school, and bringing in wood and water, and all that, is good enough for half these fellers in Polktown. They haven’t any spirit in ’em!” Marty frequently complained to his cousin.
Janice was far too wise to try to talk him out of this mental attitude. Marty—as his mother often said—was “as stubborn as a mule.”
But she influenced him by other means. She shamed the boy into doing some things that he would gladly have left undone; she ignored his faults, bolstered up his pride, and spurred his ambition. Secretly her cousin would have done much to keep Janice’s good opinion. But, of course, boy-like, he would not admit his affection for her.
The hour for the arrival of the lake steamboat approached. From her window Janice had watched for the smudge of her smoke against the sky, and the appearance of her bow around the steep promontory which hid the lower end of the lake from the Day house.
When the steamer thus appeared she was more than two miles from the Polktown dock. But Janice seized her hat and hastened down the hill.
She was not the only person abroad interested in the arrival of the boat. When Janice came to the main street of the town she saw several people going down to the dock.