Janice Day at Poketown Part 31

She was not interested in Nelson Haley in a way to crave the attentions that he had begun to show her. Indeed, she did not really appreciate his att.i.tude, for there was nothing silly in Janice's character. She was still a happy, hearty _girl_; and if she had romantic dreams of the future, they were nothing but dreams as yet!

She had the same interest in Nelson that she had in her cousin Marty.

It troubled her that the young man did not seem to have any serious interest in life. Just as long as he tutored his cla.s.ses through their recitations in a manner satisfactory to the school committee, he seemed quite careless of anything else about the school. He admitted this, in his laughing way, to the girl, when she broached the subject of the fight for a new school.

"But it's your _job_!" exclaimed Janice. "You more than anybody else ought to be interested in having the boys and girls of Poketown get a decent schoolhouse."

"And suppose old Elder Concannon and the rest of the committee get after me with a sharp stick?" queried Nelson.

"I should think _you_, a collegian and an educated man, would be only too eager to help in such a movement as this," Janice cried. "Oh, Nelson! don't you know that the people who are waking up in this town need your help?"

"My goodness me! how serious you are about it," he returned, teasingly.

"Of course, if you insist, I'll risk my job with the committee and come out flat-footed for the new schoolhouse and reform."

"I don't wish you to do anything at all for _me_," returned Janice, rather tartly. "If your own conscience doesn't tell you what course to pursue, pray remain neutral--as you are. But I am disappointed in you."

"There is feminine logic for you!" laughed the young man. "With one breath you tell me to follow the dictates of my own conscience, and then you show me plainly just how much you will despise me if I go against your side of the controversy."

"You are mistaken," Janice said, with some little heat. "I do not personally care what you do, only as your action reflects upon your own character."

"Now, dear me!" he sighed, still amused at her earnestness, "I thought if I came out strongly at the town meeting for the new school, you would award me the palm."

"My goodness me!" exclaimed the exasperated girl. "Somebody ought to award you a palm--and right on the ear! You're as big a tease as Marty," and she refused to discuss the school project with him any further.

CHAPTER XXII

AT THE SUGAR CAMP

Nelson Haley was, however, at the town meeting and spoke in favor of the new school building. Janice had a full report of it afterward from Marty, who squeezed in at the back with several of the other boys and drank in the long and tedious wrangle between the partisans in the school matter.

"And, by jinks!" the boy proclaimed, "lemme tell you, Janice, it looked like the vote was goin' ag'in us till Mr. Haley began to talk. I thought he didn't have much interest in the thing. n.o.body thought he did. I heard some of the old fellers cacklin' that 'teacher didn't favor the idee none.'

"But, say! When he got up to talk, he showed 'em. He was sitting alongside of Elder Concannon himself, and the Elder had made a mighty strong speech against increasin' taxes and burdenin' the town for years and years with a school debt.

"But, talk about argument! Mr. Haley sailed inter them old fossils, and made the fur fly, you bet!"

"Oh, Marty! Fur fly from fossils?" chuckled Janice.

"That _does_ sound like a teaser, don't it?" responded her cousin, with a grin. "Just the same, Mr. Haley made 'em all sit up and take notice.

He didn't only speak for the schoolhouse, and new methods of teaching, and a graded school; but he took up Elder Concannon's arguments and shot 'em full of holes.

"You ought to have seen the old gentleman's face when Mr. Haley proved that a better-taught generation of scholars would possess an increased earning power and so be better able to take up and pay the school bonds than the present taxpayers.

"Say! the folks cheered! When Mr. Haley sat down, the question was put and the vote went through with a rush. But Elder Concannon and Old Bill Jones, and Mr. Cross Moore, and some of the others, were as mad as they could be."

"Mad at Mr. Haley?" queried Janice, with sudden anxiety.

"You bet! But they can't take the school away from him till the end of the year, as long as he doesn't neglect his work. So Dad says, and he knows."

Janice was worried. She knew that Nelson Haley had hoped to teach the Poketown school at least two years, so as to get what he called "a stake" for law-school studies. And there were not many ungraded schools in the state that paid as well as Poketown's; for it was a large school.

The furor occasioned by the special town meeting, and the fight for the new school, pa.s.sed over. A site for the school was secured just off of High Street near the center of the town--a much handier situation for all concerned. The ground would be broken for the cellar as soon as the frost had gone.

The committee appointed at the town meeting to have charge of the building of the school were all in favor of it. There were three of them,--Mr. Ma.s.sey, the druggist, the proprietor of the Lake View Inn, and Dr. Poole, one of the two medical pract.i.tioners in the town. These three were instructed to appoint two others to act with them, and as these two appointees need not be tax-payers, one of them was Nelson Haley, who acted as secretary.

When Janice heard of this, she was delighted. She had not seen the teacher more than to say "how-de-do" since their rather warm discussion before the date of the town meeting. Now she put herself in the way of meeting him where they might have a tete-a-tete.

There were not many social affairs in Poketown for young people.

Janice had attended one or two of the parties where boys and girls mingled indiscriminately and played "kissing games," then she refused all such invitations. She was not old enough to expect to be bidden to the few social gatherings held by the more lively cla.s.s of people in the town.

The church did little outside of the ladies' sewing circle to promote social intercourse in the congregation. So, although the school-teacher might have been invited to a dozen evening entertainments during that winter, Janice did not chance to meet him where they could have a "good, long talk" until the Hammett Twins gave their annual Sugar Camp party.

The two little old ladies, whom Janice had met so soon after coming to Poketown, had become staunch friends of the girl. She had been at their home on the Middletown road several times--twice to remain over night, for both Miss Blossom and Miss p.u.s.s.y enjoyed having young people about them.

They were an odd little couple, but kindly withal, and loved children desperately, as many spinster ladies do. They had never married because of the illness for many years of both their father and their mother. Besides, the twins had never wished to be separated.

Now, at something over sixty years of age, they owned a fine farm and the most productive sugar-maple orchard in that part of the state. At sugaring time each year they invited all the young folk Walky Dexter could pack into his party wagon, to the camp not far from their house; and, as maple-sugar making was a new industry to Janice, she was not a little eager when she received her invitation from the two old ladies.

The "sugaring" was on a Sat.u.r.day, and the party met at the schoolhouse.

Some of the larger girls who had treated Janice so unpleasantly when she first visited the school were yet pupils; but they were much more friendly with the girl from Greensboro than at first. They might have been a wee bit jealous of her, however; for Nelson Haley would never treat them other than as a teacher should treat his scholars, whereas he paid marked attention to Janice whenever he was in her society.

Once he had asked permission to call upon her; but Janice had only laughed and told him that her aunt would be pleased to have him come, of course. She was not at all sure that she liked Mr. Nelson Haley well enough to allow him to confine his attentions to her! Young as she was, Janice had serious ideas about such matters.

However, she was glad to have him to talk to again on this occasion.

"I've never had a chance to tell you how proud of you I was when they told me what you did at the town meeting," Janice whispered, as they sat side by side in the party wagon.

Nelson grinned at her cheerfully. "The old Elder scarcely speaks to me," he said. "He's even forgotten that I can turn a Latin phrase as they used to when he went to the university."

"Oh, that is too bad! But don't you feel that you did right?"

"I'll tell you better when it comes time to engage a teacher for next year."

"Oh, dear! Maybe they'll put in a new school committee at the July school meeting. They ought to."

"The Elder and his comrades in crime have been in office for eight or ten years, I understand. They are fairly glued there, and it will take a good deal to oust them. You see, they have nothing to do with the building of the new school."

"But if that school is finished and ready for occupancy next fall, you ought to be at the head of it. It won't be fair to put you out,"

Janice said, with gravity.

"We'll hope for the best," and Nelson Haley laughed as usual. "But if I lose my job and have to beg my bread from door to door, I hope you will remember, Janice, that I told you so."

"You are perfectly ridiculous," declared the girl. "Aren't you ever serious two minutes at a time?"

"Pooh! what's the good of being 'solemncholly'? Take things as they come--that's _my_ motto."