Janice Day, the Young Homemaker Part 6

"Why, Miss Peckham! I haven't done a thing to him," declared Janice

Miss Peckham, however, had read the girl's face aright. She saw that Janice knew something about the missing cat.

"You tell me what you know!" she stormed, her clawlike hands shaking the top rail of the fence. "I wouldn't trust none of you young ones in this neighborhood. You are always up to some capers."

"But really, honestly, I haven't done a thing to your Sam,"

Janice said, shrinking from telling all she knew about the injured animal.

"You know where he is?" Miss Peckham accused.

"Oh, I don't, either."

"When did you see him last?" probed the other, sharply.

"This--this morning."

"What time this morning?"

"Before breakfast. Early," gasped Janice, wondering what she would say next.

"Humph! Something funny about the way you answer," said the suspicious spinster. "where was Sam when you saw him that early?"

"Running across our back yard," Janice gasped, telling the exact truth--but no more.

"Ha!" exploded the other, "What made him run?"

After all, Janice Day did not want to "tell on" Arlo Junior.

Arlo Junior was the child of all others in the neighborhood whom Miss Peckham carried on guerrilla warfare with. She had threatened to go to the police station and have Arlo Junior locked up the very next time he crossed her path in a mischievous way.

Janice knew that Miss Peckham was a very active member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and if she knew that Arlo Junior had been in any way connected with Sam's injury, she would be all the more bitter toward the young rascal.

And really, after all, it was Olga Cedarstrom who had hurt the cat. But to tell Miss Peckham that, and how it all came about, would do little to pacify the spinster. So Janice kept silent.

It seemed to her that she had gone about as far in the path of deceit as she could go.

"You saw him running; what made him run?" repeated Miss Peckham.

"He--he was frightened, I guess, Miss Peckham. There were other cats. It was early this morning before anybody else was up around here. The cats all ran out of our yard."

"And I warrant you'd done something to make 'em run," declared the tart-tongued neighbor. "Oh, I know all you young ones around here. You ain't no better than the rest of 'em, Janice Day."

"Oh, Miss Peckham!" murmured the girl.

"And if I find out that you done something outrageous to those cats--to my Sam, 'specially--it'll be the sorriest day of your life. Now, you see if 'tisn't!"

She turned and flounced into her house. Janice came slowly back to the kitchen door where she found the new houseworker frankly listening.

"Guess she's a sharper, ain't she?" squeaked the woman. "Well, I won't tell her 'bout the cats in the back kitchen. But o'

course, if folks will hire them Swede--"

CHAPTER V. FATHER AND DAUGHTER

It did seem to Janice Day at this time as though trouble after trouble was being heaped upon her young shoulders. Miss Peckham and her search for her Sam was, of course, a small matter compared to the loss of the treasure-box and the heirlooms in it.

Janice waited eagerly for daddy to come home and report on this matter; and his report, when he did come, sunk Janice's heart fathoms deep in an ocean of despair.

"Oh, Daddy, it can't be!" she cried, sobbing against his coat sleeve in the hall. "Olga wouldn't be so wicked! How could she?"

"It is pretty sure that she has left town and has left no address behind her. It looks as though she had deliberately tried to efface herself from the community," said Mr. Broxton Day slowly.

"Are you sure, Janice, that the box cannot be found?"

"Oh, Daddy! I've looked everywhere. Dear Mamma's picture that I loved so much! And her, diary I"

"More than that, daughter, more than that," said her father, his own voice breaking. "I should have been more careful about allowing you to take the box. There was something else--"

"Oh, Daddy! what? I didn't know there was a secret compartment in the treasure-box," she added wonderingly.

"You would scarcely understand, my dear," he told her with a heavy sigh. "It was but a shallow place. There were letters in it--letters which I treasured above everything else in the box.

Letters your Mamma wrote me before you were born, when I was away from home and she thought she might never see me again. We were young, then, my dear; and we loved each other very much."

His voice trailed away into silence. The girl, young as she was, was awed by his grief. She suddenly realized that her own sorrow over the lost treasure-box was shallow indeed beside her father's despair.

It was some time later that she told him just how well she had searched for the missing box. She narrated, too, all the particulars of the early morning cat episode and the trouble brought about by the mischief-loving Arlo Junior, which she had been unable to tell him earlier in the day.

"It would seem, then," Mr. Day observed, not unamused by the account of the neighbors' boy's practical joke, "that if Olga took the box it was on the spur of the moment. She certainly had not planned to leave us, but lost her temper and went because she was in a rage."

"Yes, sir. I suppose so," admitted Janice. "And she was mad at me, too. I could see she thought I had shut the cats in the back kitchen."

"Yet Olga's going," said Mr. Broxton Day, still thoughtfully, "was skillfully planned--just as though she had everything arranged for it before the row this morning. Don't just understand that."

"Oh, Daddy! You don't suppose Olga was one of those awful crooks we read of in the papers?"

Mr. Broxton threw back his head and laughed in his very heartiest fas.h.i.+on.

"Whatever else she was," he said, finally, "I don't think she was a lady buccaneer. Olga Cedarstrom appeared to be almost as stupid a person as I ever saw. But she was bad tempered--no doubt of that."

"Yes, Daddy, her disposition was not very sweet,"

admitted Janice, with a sigh.

"But it looks queer," her father pursued. "Sending for an out-of-town taxi, and all I say, daughter which way did it drive?"

"The taxicab?"

"Yes."

"Toward town, Daddy. Right along Knight Street."

"Humph! might have gone right through town and taken the Napsburg pike. Yet, they could have turned off at Joyce Street and got into the Dover pike. Or gone to Clewitt, or Preston. Oh, well,"