“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.”