DEEP WATERS
The dispatch in the New York paper was dated from a Texan city on the day before. It was brief, but seemed of enough importance to have the place of honor on the front page of the great daily.
There were all the details of a night advance, a bloody attack and a fearful repulse in which General Juan Dicampa's force had been nearly wiped out.
The half thousand captured with the famous guerrilla chief were reported to have been hacked to pieces when they cried for quarter, and Juan Dicampa himself was given the usual short shrift connected in most people's minds with Mexican justice. He had been shot three hours after his capture.
It was an awful thing—and awful to read about. The whole affair had happened a long way from that part of Chihuahua in which daddy's mine was situated; but Janice immediately realized that the "long arm" of Dicampa could no longer keep Mr. Broxton Day from disaster, or punish those who offended the American mining man.
The very worst that could possibly happen to her father, Janice thought, had perhaps already happened.
That was a very sorrowful evening indeed at the old Day house on Hillside Avenue. Although Mr. Jason Day and Janice's father were half brothers only, the elder man had in his heart a deep and tender love for Broxton, or "Brocky," as he called him.
He remembered Brocky as a lad—always. He felt the superiority of his years—and presumably his wisdom—over the younger man. Despite the fact that Mr. Broxton Day had early gone away from Polktown, and had been deemed very successful in point of wealth in the Middle West, Uncle Jason considered him still a boy, and his ventures in business and in mining as a species of "wild oat sowing," of which he could scarcely approve.
"No," he sighed. "If Brocky had been more settled he'd ha' been better off—I snum he would! A piece o' land right here back o' Polktown—or a venture in a store, if so be he must trade—would ha' been safer for him than a slather o' mines down there among them Mexicaners."
"Don't talk so—don't talk so, Jason!" sniffed Aunt Almira.