Janice Day at Poketown | Page 9

out of the garden at pleasure.
Robins were whisking in and out of the tops of the trees, quarreling over the first of the cherry crop. Janice heard Marty's hoe and she opened the garden gate. About half of this good-sized patch was given over to the "'tater" crop; the remainder of the garden seemed--to the casual glance--merely a wilderness of weeds. There may have been rows of vegetable seeds planted there in the beginning; but now it was a perfect mat of green things that have no commercial value--to say the least.
Marty was about halfway down the first row of potatoes. He was cleaning the row pretty well, and the weeds were wilting in the sun; but the rows were as crooked as a snake's path.
"Hullo!" said the boy, willing to stop and lean on the hoe handle. "Don't you want to help?"
"I don't believe I could hoe, Marty," said Janice, doubtfully.
"If you'd been a boy cousin, I wouldn't have minded," grunted Marty. "He and me could have had some fun."
"Don't you think I can be any fun?" demanded Janice, rather amused by the frankness of the youth.
"Never saw a gal that was," responded Marty. "Always in the way. Marm says I got to be perlite to 'em----"
"And is that such a cross?"
"Don't know anything about no cross," growled Marty; "but a boy cousin that I could lick would ha' been a whole lot more to my mind."
"Oh, Marty! we're not going to quarrel."
"I dunno whether we are or not," returned the pessimistic youth. "Wait till there's only one piece o' pie left at dinner some day. You'll have ter have it. Marm'll say so. But if you was a boy--an' I could lick ye--ye wouldn't dare take it. D'ye see?"
"I'm not so awfully fond of pie," admitted Janice. "And I wouldn't let a piece stand in the way of our being good friends."
"Oh, well; we'll see," said Marty, grudgingly. "But ye can't hoe, ye say?"
"I don't believe so. I'd cut off more potato plants than weeds, maybe. Can't you cultivate your potatoes with a horse cultivator? I see the farmers doing that around Greensboro. It's lots quicker."
"Oh, we got a horse-hoe," said Marty, without interest. "But it got broke an' Dad ain't fixed it yet. B'sides, ye couldn't use it 'twixt these rows. They're too crooked. But then--as the feller said--there's more plants in a crooked row."
"What's all that?" demanded Janice, waving a hand toward the other half of the garden.
"Weeds--mostly. Right there's carrots. Marm always will plant carrots ev'ry spring; but they git lost so easy in the weeds."
"I know carrots," cried Janice, brightly. "Let me weed 'em," and she dropped on her knees at the beginning of the rows.
"Help yourself!" returned Marty, plying the hoe. "But it looks to me as though them carrots had just about fainted."
It looked so to Janice, too, when she managed to find the tender little plants which, coming up thickly enough in the row, now looked as livid as though grown in a cellar. The rank weeds were keeping all the sun and air from them.
"I can find them, just the same," she confided to Marty, when he came back up the next row. "And I'd better thin them, too, as I go along, hadn't I?"
"Help yourself," repeated the boy. "But pickin' 'tater bugs wouldn't be as bad as that, to my mind."
"'Every one to his fancy, And me to my Nancy.'
as the old woman said when she kissed her cow," quoted Janice, laughing. "You can have the bugs, Marty."
"Somebody'll have to git 'em, pretty soon, or the bugs'll have the 'taters," declared her cousin. "Say! you'd ought to have somethin' besides your fingers ter scratch around them plants."
"Yes, and a pair of old gloves, Marty," agreed Janice, ruefully.
"Huh! Ain't that a girl all over? Allus have ter be waited on. I wisht you'd been a boy cousin--I jest do! Then we'd git these 'taters done 'fore night."
"And how about getting the carrots weeded, Marty?" she returned, laughing at him.
Marty grunted. But when he finished the second row he threw down his hoe and disappeared through the garden gate. Janice wondered if he had deserted her--and the potatoes--for the afternoon; but by and by he returned, bringing a little three-fingered hand-weeder, and tossed on the ground beside her a pair of old kid gloves--evidently his mother's.
"Oh, thank you, Marty!" cried Janice. "I don't mind working, but I hated to tear my fingers all to pieces."
"Huh!" grunted Marty. "Ain't that jest like a girl?"
Grudgingly, however, as his interest in Janice was shown, the girl appreciated the fact that Marty was warming toward her. Intermittently, as he plodded up and down the potato rows, they conversed and became better acquainted.
"Daddy has a friend who owns a farm outside of Greensboro, and I loved