Janice Day, the Young Homemaker Part 45

But really, one could do nothing with Stella Latham, once that subborn person had made up her mind to be "mad." Stella gloried in showing all the perversity with which she was cursed; so Janice sighed and gave it up.

"No use. I hope I won't have to ask Mrs. Latham. Then there will be trouble, I fear."

The walk over the hill and down the lane, crossing the brook Gummy Carringford had once spoken of, was a pleasant walk, after all. It was not dusty, and there were shade trees part of the way. By the time Janice came to the little house which her father and she had once visited to look for Olga, she was quite cool and collected again.

But as soon as she drew near to the tenant house the girl was startled. There was not a sign of life about it. There were no wagons or farm tools about the sheds or barnyard. There were no cattle in the stable, nor pigs in the pen, nor poultry in the wired run.

"Goodness me! have the Johnsons gone, too?" cried Janice.

She hurried to the little house. There were no curtains at the windows, and she could see right through the empty house.

"That's what Stella meant!" exclaimed Janice. "Oh, the mean, mean thing! To let me walk away over here without telling me that they had gone! And now she is waiting back there to laugh at me when I return!" Janice Day did not like to be laughed at any more than other people. And she particularly shrank from facing the sarcastic Stella on this occasion.

"At least, I will make some inquiries elsewhere, first," she thought, and set forth along the public highway, on which the little house fronted, toward another dwelling that was in sight.

There were people in this house, that was sure. There were children playing in the yard and a pleasant-faced woman on the front porch, sewing and keeping an eye on the children.

She did put out a somewhat forbidding air when Janice turned in at the gate; but then she saw the girl had no bag or sample case, so she brightened up again.

"You haven't anything to sell, I guess?" the woman began, even before Janice uttered a word.

"Oh, no," answered the girl.

"Come up and sit down," said the woman. Then she added: "Dear me, you are only a little girl. It's hot walking. Will you have a drink of water?"

"No, thank you. I got a drink at the well back there," and Janice pointed at the tenant house on Mr. Latham's place.

"Oh, yes; Latham's cottage."

"The Johnsons used to live there, did they not? asked the caller.

"Swedes--yes," said the woman.

"I was looking for them."

"But goodness, you're not a Swede!" exclaimed the woman.

"Oh, no," laughed Janice. "But I wanted to see them about a friend of theirs--a girl who used to work for us."

"Oh! I thought you couldn't be a foreigner," said the woman.

"Well," she added, "I'm afraid you'll have to go a long way to find out anything from the Johnsons."

"You don't mean--"

"I mean they've left the country," said the woman.

"Left this part of the country?"

"They have gone back to Sweden," said Janice's informant, nodding over her sewing. "Yes. They had a stroke of luck. Mrs. Johnson told me herself in her broken talk. Near's I could find out her grandfather had died and left her a bit of property, and she and her family were going back to the place they came from ten years ago, to attend to it. Lucky folks, some of them foreigners. I don't see for the life of me why they ever leave their homes and come over here, when they've got money and land comin' to them at home."

The woman talked on, even faster than Miss Peckham was wont to talk. But her volubility gave Janice a chance to recover her self-possession. She saw quite clearly that her errand had come to naught. Even if the Lathams positively knew the missing Olga had been named Cedarstrom before her marriage they probably did not know where Olga now was.

The people who were the more likely to know, these Johnsons, had gone back to their native land. Janice wondered, despairingly, if Olga had gone back to Sweden too.

But the girl was able to hide her trouble from this new acquaintance. The woman was glad to have her stay-- and talk.

Rather, the hostess did the talking. It was evident that she got little chance for conversation, living as she did on this rather lonely road.

Janice planned what she would do, however, while she listened.

Rather than go back and perhaps have another quarrel with Stella, she decided she would go home and tell her father what she had found out. He might write to Mrs. Latham for information--if the farmer's wife had any--regarding Olga.

At least, it was one sure thing, that such information as Janice had obtained was much too late. An ocean separated her now from the Johnsons, Olga's friends.

CHAPTER XXVIII. GUMMY COMES INTO HIS OWN

Janice bade her new acquaintance good-bye with some difficulty.

The woman by the roadside did love to talk. But when the girl was well rested she went on.

She remembered very clearly the way she and daddy had come to the little Johnson cottage in the automobile. So she knew she could find her way back. One thing she did not take into consideration, however; that was, that an automobile gets over the ground a great deal faster than one can walk.

An hour later, past mid-afternoon, dusty and footsore, she was still marching towards Greensboro along a very pleasant, but a very wearisome, road. She heard the rumble of wheels behind her, but she was too tired to turn to look.

Motor car after motor car had pa.s.sed her while she was trudging along in the dust, and not one driver stopped to offer her a lift.

But a friendly voice now hailed her as a horse was drawn down to a walk. It reached Janice Day's ear like an angelic whisper:

"Don't you want to ride, Miss?"

She wheeled about with almost a scream of joy. "Gummy Carringford!"

"Jicksy! Is that you, Janice?" gasped the boy. "I'd never know it, you're so smothered in dust. What are you doing away out here? Get in--do!"

He offered her a hand and pulled her up to the high step into the front of the covered wagon. She almost fell to the seat.

"You are the best boy!" she gasped.

"Ain't I? They can't get along without me at my house. What under the sun are you wandering around for away out here?"

She told him in broken sentences, and he sympathized with her because of her disappointment.

"I could have told you the Johnsons had gone, if you'd asked me.

But I did not suppose you were interested in them any more," he said.

"And daddy, being out of the bank, did not know that Mr. Johnson had withdrawn his account and sailed for Europe. Oh, dear me, it is so exasperating! Everything about that Olga, and connected with her, is so mysterious."

"I wonder if I couldn't find out something about her in Pickletown?" suggested Gummy.

"Daddy has been there often, I believe," she said doubtfully.