Eliza flung her arm about his neck and laid her cheek against his.  “Poor Danny!  You’re a brick!”

“It’s the bread-line for us,” he told her.

“Never mind.  We’re used to it now.”  She laughed contentedly and snuggled her face closer to his.

It was on the following morning that O’Neil’s cablegram announcing the result of his interview with Illis reached Omar.  Dr. Gray brought the news to the Appleton bungalow while Dan and his sister were still at breakfast.  “Happy Tom” came puffing and blowing at his heels with a highly satisfied I-told-you-so expression on his round features.

“He made it!  The tide has turned,” cried the doctor as he burst in waving the message on high.  “Yes!” he explained, in answer to their excited questions.  “Murray got the money and our troubles are over.  Now give me some coffee, Eliza.  I’m all shaky.”

“English money!” commented Slater.  “The same as we used on the North Pass.”

“Then he interested Illis!” cried Dan.

“Yep!  He’s the white-winged messenger of hope.  I wasn’t worried for a minute,” Tom averred.

The breakfast which followed was of a somewhat hysterical and fragmentary nature, for Eliza felt her heart swelling, and the faithful Gray was all but undone by the strain he had endured.  “That’s the first food I’ve tasted for weeks,” he confessed.  “I’ve eaten, but I haven’t tasted; and now—­I’m not hungry.”  He sighed, stretched his long limbs gratefully, and eyed the Appletons with a kindly twinkle.  “You were up in the air, too, weren’t you?  The chief will appreciate last night’s affair.”

Eliza colored faintly.  “It was nothing.  Please don’t tell him.”  At the incredulous lift of his brows she hastened to explain:  “Tom said you men ‘belonged’ to Mr. O’Neil and Dan was an outsider.  That hurt me dreadfully.”

“Well, he can’t say that now; Dan is one of Murray’s boys, all right, and you—­you must be his girl.”

At that moment Mellen and McKay burst into the bungalow, demanding the truth behind the rumor which had just come to their ears; and there followed fresh explanations and rejoicings, through which Eliza sat quietly, thrilled by the note of genuine affection and loyalty that pervaded it all.  But, now that the general despondency had vanished and joy reigned in its place, Tom Slater relapsed into his habitual gloom and spoke forebodingly of the difficulties yet to be encountered.

“Murray don’t say how much he’s raised,” he remarked.  “It may be only a drop in the bucket.  We’ll have to go through all this again, probably, and the next time he won’t find it so easy to sting a millionaire.”

“We’ll last through the winter anyhow—­”

“Winter!” Slater shook his bald head.  “Winter is hard on old men like me.”

“We’ll have the bridge built by spring, sure!” Mellen declared.

“Maybe!  I hope so.  I wish I could last to see it, but the smallpox undermined me.  Perhaps it’s a mercy I’m so far gone; nobody knows yet whether the bridge will stand, and—­I’d hate to see it go out.”