_ 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 fashion.
"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," finished Broxton Day, "that cab could have come from, and returned to, any one of a dozen places within a few miles of Greensboro."
"But how do you know she was not driven right to the railroad station, as long as you are sure she did not go to Pickletown?"
"I found out," said Mr. Day, quietly, that there isn't a Swede in town who drives a taxi. And you say the driver was a Swede, and that it was a regular taxicab."
"Oh, yes, Daddy. He was one of her own kind of folks. I heard them talking together when he went up for her trunk. I wish I had taken the number of that cab!" cried Janice woefully.
"Never mind. Don't blame yourself too harshly, girly."
"But I do blame myself, Daddy," she cried, wiping her eyes. "Those dear pictures and the diary! And most of all mother's miniature! Why, Daddy Day! I'd give a million dollars rather than have lost the treasure-box."
"No use crying over the spilled milk," he said, reflectively. "It does seem to me as though Olga was not just the sort of person who would steal--I say! You told me she telephoned for the taxi?'
"Yes. At least, she telephoned and talked to somebody over the 'phone in Swedish."
"You don't say!" repeated Mr. Day thoughtfully using a Yankeeism that betrayed his birthplace if nothing else did, although he had long since come from New England to the Middle West. "Then in all probability she telephoned to a friend, and the friend sent the taxicab. I wonder if that Willie Sangreen is in this?
"I tell you!" he exclaimed finally. "In the morning I will go and see the superintendent of our telephone exchange personally. Perhaps, when I explain the case, he will tell me the number Olga called up."
"Oh, Daddy! can you do that?"
"There is a record made of every call," he told her. "Now don't worry more than you can help, Janice. We'll do something about it. Never fear."
His encouraging "do something" was bound to cheer his little daughter. She hurried away to see if dinner was not ready, and caught Delia frankly listening at the door.
"Why, Delia, why didn't you knock or speak?" Janice asked.
But Delia was absolutely unruffled. She drawled:
"I didn't know but you wanted to talk to your Paw some more, and the dinner could wait."
When, a little later, they were seated at table and Delia appeared with the first hot dishes, it must be confessed that her appearance somewhat startled Mr. Broxton Day.
Their anxiety about the lost treasure-box had precluded his having asked any questions regarding the new houseworker; her appearance was as startling as though she had come straight from a sideshow.
Janice put her napkin to her lips to hide their trembling. But her eyes danced. Daddy's amazement was quickly smothered. He was silent, however, until Delia was out of the room again.
"What do you think of her, Daddy?" giggled the little girl.
"I certainly did not see her before hiring her. In fact, I did my business over the phone with the manager of the intelligence office. I gathered from him that
she was a woman of middle age, and "settled," whatever that may mean. If it means that she can work and stay settled here-- But what a queer looking creature! How does she seem to take hold, Janice? Does she seem intelligent?"
"I haven't made up my mind yet," murmured his little daughter. "She doesn't look as though she knew anything at all. But maybe she does. You said yourself that we couldn't have anybody worse than Olga."
"I don't know about that," he retorted. "I may have to take that back. Sh! Here she comes again."
Aside from the fact that she served cold plates for the roast and vegetables, and hot ones for the salad; that from her great height she was almost certain to spill food on the table before she got a dish set down before them; and that she kept bouncing in and out of the dining room to ask them if they were ready for dessert; she managed to get through the meal without making Mr. Day and Janice any great discomfort.
In the living room, later, when Mr. Day was in his comfortable chair and Janice had her school books spread out upon the table under the reading lamp, the father said softly:
"Well, my dear, it is not the sort of life I hoped we would lead when we built this house. Your dear mother was such a wonderful housekeeper, and could manage so well. I never had a thought or a care about the housekeeping affairs. But now--"
"I know, Daddy," broke in Janice earnestly. "If only I didn't have to go to school!"
"That is something that cannot even be discussed," he rejoined, smiling at her gravely. "As I told you last night, my dear, what your mother and I planned regarding your education must be carried through if possible."
"But college is a long way ahead," said Janice wistfully. "And meanwhile you are not comfortable and the house is going to rack and ruin, just as Miss Peckham says."
"Did the old girl say that?" he wanted to know, with rather a rueful smile on his lips.
"Yes. She was in here the other day and she is so nosey. She was bound to go all through house, although I did not want her to. I know it doesn't look spick and span as it should--"
"That is not your fault, Janice," her father said quickly. "Don't let it worry you. You must stick to your books. And if we can get nobody better than this woman--or Olga--to help, we must expect things to be in rather bad shape about the house.
"I suppose there are good housekeepers for hire--somewhere. They certainly do not seem to be in Greensboro. And, then, I cannot afford to pay a very high wage. You see, my dear, we are not rich."
"No, Daddy," Janice agreed. "I quite know that. But we have enough, and to spare, I am sure."
"So far we have managed to pull along," he said smiling at her quizzically. "And perhaps we shall be even better off in time. I am up to my neck, as the boys say, in an investment in Mexican mines. I was able to get into it before your dear mother died, and she quite approved. Several Greensboro men have invested in the same string of mines and there is ore being got out--ore of good quality.
"But thus far there have been no dividends. Rather, we have had to put in more money for improvements. But when once we get started producing, you and I may have something like riches."
"Oh, won't that be nice, Daddy!" she exclaimed, wide-eyed and red-cheeked in her excitement. "To be really rich!"
"Well, we shall be able to engage somebody better fitted perhaps for the position of housekeeper," sighed Mr. Day, turning to his newspaper again.
"That's all right, Daddy," she said. "But meanwhile I am going to do all I can to make things go smoother. Just as you said last night, it can only be brought about by somebody's doing something. I'll do something, you see if I don't."
She made this declaration cheerfully. But when she closed her books, kissed daddy, and went up to bed, her countenance was overcast with an expression far from cheerful.
Only the evening before she had sat here and looked her treasures over. The diary which mother had kept when she was a little girl--all the innocent little secrets she had written on the pages which Janice so delighted to read!
And the lovely miniature, with mother in the very dress she wore the evening she and Broxton Day were betrothed. Janice knew all about that. Her mother had talked freely of her courtship and of what a splendid young man daddy had appeared to be in her eyes.
Her mother's frequently expressed admiration for the young man who came from New England to win his fortune in the Middle West was doubtless the foundation of Janice Day's unusual fondness for her father.
That by her carelessness she should have brought about the loss of the treasure-box and those things which both she and daddy considered of such personal value, was the thought that weighed most heavily on the girl's heart.
Without turning on her light, she went to the window and looked out into the soft spring darkness! Daddy's letters! Mother's miniature! The treasured old diary that Janice so loved!
Her troubled little heart overflowed. She flung herself down with her face hidden in her arms folded upon the window sill, while ungovernable sobs shook her body.
The loss of the treasure-box was a disaster for, which she could not easily forgive herself. _