out your father's
situation. At the very moment you are worrying he may be eating
supper, or hob-nobbing with a party of very courteous and hospitable
ranch owners, or fishing in a neighboring brook where the trout are as
hungry as shoats at feeding time, or otherwise enjoying himself.

"And so, now, to you and your letter which reached me by one of my
messengers from Juarez, by whom I shall send this reply. Yes, I knew
you would find yourself among a people as strange to you as though they
were inhabitants of another planet. Relatives though they are, they
are so much different from our friends in and about Greensboro, that I
can understand their being a perfect shock to you.

"I was afraid Jason and Almira lived a sort of shiftless, hopeless,
get-along-the-best-way-you-can life. When I left Poketown twenty-five
years ago I thought it had creeping paralysis! It must be worse by
this time.

"But you keep alive, Janice, my dear. Keep kicking--like the frog in
the milk-can. _Do something_. Don't let the poison of laziness
develop in your blood. If they're in a slack way there at Jason's,
help 'em out of it. Be your Daddy's own girl. Don't shirk a plain
duty. _Do something yourself, and make others do something, too!_"

There was much in Mr. Broxton Day's letter beside this; there were
intimate little things that Janice would have shown to nobody; but
downstairs she read aloud all Daddy's jolly little comments upon the
country and the people he saw; and about his eating beans so frequently
that he dreamed he had turned into a gigantic Boston bean-pot that was
always full of steaming baked beans. "They are called 'frijoles'," he
wrote; "but a bean by any other name is just the same!"

The paragraphs that impressed Janice most, however, as repeated above,
she likewise kept to herself. Daddy had expected she would find
Poketown just what it was. Yet he expected something of her--something
that should make a change in her relatives, and in Poketown itself.

He expected Janice to _do something_.

CHAPTER X

BEGINNING WITH A BEDSTEAD

Janice got up and took her usual before-breakfast run the next morning.
The Days remained the last family to rise in the neighborhood. The
smoke from the broken kitchen chimney crawled heavenward long after the
fires in other kitchen-stoves had burned down to hot coals.

So when the girl got back to the house, Aunt 'Mira had scarcely begun
getting the meal. Jani