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There was a great deal more to the letter, but at first Janice could not go on with it for surprise. The clerkly writer with the abundance of flowery phrases, Juan Dicampa was, then, a Mexican chieftain perhaps a half-breed Yaqui murderer! The thought rather startled Janice. Yet she was thankful to remember how warmly the man had written of her father.
She had no means of informing herself whether he were alive or dead. She wrote to him faithfully at least once each week; but she did not know whether the letters reached him or not. As previously advised, she addressed the outer envelope for her father's letters in care of Juan Dicampa. But that seemed a hollow mockery now. She was sending the letters to a dead man.
But he got to the school, and the School Committee remained under cover for the time being. Janice, coming back from Middletown in the afternoon, stopped at the post-office and got the mail. In it was a letter which she knew must be from her father, although the outer envelope was addressed in the same precise, clerkly hand which she associated with the mysterious Juan Dicampa.
Much of what followed in her father's letter she had to transmit to the bank officials and others of his business associates in her old home town. But the important thing, it seemed all the time to Janice, was Juan Dicampa. She thought about him a great deal during the next few days. Mostly she thought about his health, and the chances of his being shot in some battle down there in Mexico.
She had the thought with her all the time a picture in her mind of a man, blindfolded, his wrists fastened behind him, standing with his back against a sunburnt wall and a file of ragged, barefooted soldiers in front of him. In desperation she had written a letter addressed personally to "General Juan Dicampa," sending it to the same place to which she addressed her father's letters.
It was on the day following the burial of the Narnay baby that the mystery surrounding Mr. Broxton Day's situation in Mexico was quite cleared up, and much to his daughter's satisfaction. Quite a packet of letters arrived for Janice several delayed epistles, indeed, coming in a single wrapper. With them was a letter in the exact script of Juan Dicampa that mysterious brigand chief who was Mr.
Right in front of her eyes, at the top of the very first column, were these headlines: JUAN DICAMPA CAPTURED 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.
Janice or Marty always found time to scan each page of that paper for Mexican news especially for news of the brigand chief, Juan Dicampa. She went to the reading desk after closing and returning the encyclopaedia to its proper shelf, and spread the New York paper before her. This day she had not to search for mention of her father's friend, the Zapatist chief.
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.
Of course, it was dated before the dreadful night attack which had caused the death of General Juan Dicampa and the destruction of his forces; and it had passed through that chieftain's hands and had been remailed. Janice put away the envelope, directed in the sloping, clerkly hand, and sighed. Daddy was in perfect health when he had written this last epistle and the situation had not changed.
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