The short winter day was already drawing to a close when the telegraph sounder began to call the station. Marty ran out at once and brought back the operator. He was quickly in communication with one of the great New York papers and found that it was over the paper's private wire that first authentic news from the Granadas district had arrived in the East.
The posse from Cida had found everything peaceful about the mines. The guerrilla leader, Raphele, had decamped. There had been an execution on the day John Makepiece had fled from the place; but the victims were some unfortunate Indians. The bandit had not dared kill the remaining American prisoner.
Mr. Broxton Day had managed to get into a shaft of the mine and there had lain hidden until Raphele, and his gang, had departed. Now he had gathered some of his old employees, and armed them with rifles hidden all these months in the mine, and the property was once more under Mr. Day's control and properly guarded.
Through the posse, Mr. Day made a statement to the newspapers, and to his friends and fellow-stockholders of the mine, in the States. To Janice, too, he sent a brief message of love and good cheer, stating that letters to her were already in the mail.
The relief Janice felt is not to be easily shown. To be positive, after these hours of uncertainty—and after the long weeks of worriment that had gone before—that dear Daddy was really alive and well, seemed too good to be true.
"Oh, do you suppose it can be so?" she cried, again and again, clinging to Nelson Haley's arm.
"Of course it is! Pluck up your courage, Janice," he assured her, while Marty sniveled:
"Aw, say, Janice! Doncher give way, now. Uncle Brocky is all right an' it would be dead foolish ter cry over it, when you kep' up your pluck so, before."
"Well! to please you both!" choked Janice, trying to swallow the sobs. "But—but——Come on! let's go home. Just think how worried Aunt 'Mira will be."
So they shook hands with the telegraph operator and Janice thanked him heartily. There were several other friendly folk of the neighborhood in the waiting-room when the three friends came out of the office, and the happy girl thanked them, too, for their sympathy.