II

Before the gray of dawn came over the land Bruce Duncan had started

westward. He had no self-amazement at the lightning decision. He was

only strangely and deeply exultant.

The reasons why went too deep within him to be easily seen. In the first

place, it was adventure--and Bruce's life had not been very adventurous

heretofore. It was true that he had known triumphs on the athletic

fields, and his first days at a great University had been novel and

entertaining. But now he was going to the West, to a land he had dreamed

about, the land of wide spaces and great opportunities. It was not his

first western journey. Often he had gone there as a child--had engaged

in furious battles with outlaws and Indians; but those had been

adventures of imagination only. This was reality at last. The clicking

rails beneath the speeding train left no chance for doubt.

Then there was a sense of immeasurable relief at his sudden and

unexpected freedom from the financial problems his father had left. He

would have no more consultations with impatient creditors, no more would

he strive to gather together the ruins of the business, and attempt to

salvage the small remaining fragments of his father's fortune. He was

free of it all, at last. He had never known a darker hour--and none of

them that this quiet, lonely-spirited man had known had been very

bright--than the one he had spent just before going to bed earlier that

evening. He had no plans, he didn't know which way to turn. All at once,

through the message that Barney had brought him, he had seen a clear

trail ahead. It was something to do, something at last that mattered.

Finally there remained the eminent fact that this was an answer to his

dream. He was going toward Linda, at last. The girl had been the one

living creature in his memory that he had cared for and who cared for

him--the one person whose interest in him was real. Men are a gregarious

species. The trails are bewildering and steep to one who travels them

alone. Linda, the little "spitfire" of his boyhood, had suddenly become

the one reality in his world, and as he thought of her, his memory

reviewed the few impressions he had retained of his childhood.

First was the Square House--the orphanage--where the Woman had turned

him over to the nurse in charge. Sometimes, when tobacco smoke was heavy

upon him, Bruce could catch very dim and fleeting glimpses of the

Woman's face. He would bend his mind to it, he would probe and probe,

with little, reaching filaments of thought, into the dead years--and

then, all at once, the filaments would rush together, catch hold of a

fragment of her picture, and like a chain-gang of ants carrying a straw,

come lugging it up for him to see. It was only a fleeting glimpse, only

the faintest blur in half-tone, and then quite gone. Yet he never gave

up trying. He never quit longing for just one second of vivid

remembrance. It was one of the few and really great desires that Bruce

had in life.

The few times that her memory-picture did come to him, it brought a

number of things with it. One of them was a great and overwhelming

realization of some terrible tragedy and terror the nature of which he

could not even guess. There had been terrible and tragic events--where

and how he could not guess--lost in those forgotten days of his

babyhood.

"She's been through fire," the nurse told the doctor when he came in and

the door had closed behind the Woman. Bruce _did_ remember these words,

because many years elapsed before he completely puzzled them out. The

nurse hadn't meant such fires as swept through the far-spread evergreen

forests of the Northwest. It was some other, dread fire that seared the

spirit and burned the bloom out of the face and all the gentle lights

out of the eyes. It did, however, leave certain lights, but they were

such that their remembrance brought no pleasure to Bruce. They were just

a wild glare, a fixed, strange brightness as of great fear or insanity.

The Woman had kissed him and gone quickly; and he had been too young to

remember if she had carried any sort of bundle close to her breast. Yet,

the man considered, there must have been such a bundle--otherwise he

couldn't possibly account for Linda. And there were no doubts about

her, at all. Her picture was always on the first page of the photograph

album of his memory; he had only to turn over one little sheet of years

to find her.

Of course he had no memories of her that first day, nor for the first

years. But all later memories of the Square House always included her.

She must have been nearly four years younger than himself; thus when he

was taken to the house she was only an infant. But thereafter, the

nurses put them together often; and when Linda was able to talk, she

called him something that sounded like Bwovaboo. She called him that so

often that for a long time he couldn't be sure that wasn't his real

name. Now, in manhood, he interpreted.

"Brother Bruce, of course. Linda was of course a sister."

Linda had been homely; even a small boy could notice that. Besides,

Linda was nearly six when Bruce had left for good; and he was then at an

age in which impressions begin to be lasting. Her hair was quite blond

then, and her features rather irregular. But there had been a light in

her eyes! By his word, there had been!

She had been angry at him times in plenty--over some childish game--and

he remembered how that light had grown and brightened. She had flung at

him too, like a lynx springing from a tree. Bruce paused in his

reflections to wonder at himself over the simile--for lynx were no

especial acquaintances of his. He knew them only through books, as he

knew many other things that stirred his imagination. But he laughed at

the memory of her sudden, explosive ferocity,--the way her hands had

smacked against his cheeks, and her sharp little nails had scratched

him. Curiously, he had never fought back as is the usual thing between

small boys and small girls. And it wasn't exactly chivalry either,

rather just an inability to feel resentment. Besides, there were always

tears and repentance afterward, and certain pettings that he openly

scorned and secretly loved.

"I must have been a strange kid!" Bruce thought.

It was true he had; and nothing was stranger than this attitude toward

Baby Sister. He was always so gentle with her, but at the same time he

contemplated her with a sort of amused tolerance that is to be expected

in strong men rather than solemn little boys. "Little Spitfire" he

sometimes called her; but no one else could call her anything but Linda.

For Bruce had been an able little fighter, even in those days.

There was other evidence of strangeness. He was fond of drawing

pictures. This was nothing in itself; many little boys are fond of

drawing pictures. Nor were his unusually good. Their strangeness lay in

his subjects. He liked to draw animals in particular,--the animals he

read about in school and in such books as were brought to him. And

sometimes he drew Indians and cowboys. And one day--when he wasn't half

watching what he was doing--he drew something quite different.

Perhaps he wouldn't have looked at it twice, if the teacher hadn't

stepped up behind him and taken it out of his hands. It was "geography"

then, not "drawing", and he should have been "paying attention." And he

had every reason to think that the teacher would crumple up his picture

and send him to the cloak-room for punishment.

But she did no such thing. It was true that she seized the paper, and

her fingers were all set to crumple it. But when her eyes glanced down,

her fingers slowly straightened. Then she looked again--carefully.

"What is this, Bruce?" she asked. "What have you been drawing?"

Curiously, she had quite forgotten to scold him for not paying

attention. And Bruce, who had drawn the picture with his thoughts far

away from his pencil, had to look and see himself. Then he couldn't be

sure.

"I--I don't know," the child answered. But the picture was even better

than his more conscious drawings, and it did look like something. He

looked again, and for an instant let his thoughts go wandering here and

there. "Those are trees," he said. A word caught at his throat and he

blurted it out. "Pines! Pine trees, growing on a mountain."

Once translated, the picture could hardly be mistaken. There was a range

of mountains in the background, and a distinct sky line plumed with

pines,--those tall, dark trees that symbolize, above all other trees,

the wilderness.

"Not bad for a six-year-old boy," the teacher commented. "But where,

Bruce, have you ever seen or heard of such pines?" But Bruce did not

know.

Another puzzling adventure that stuck in Bruce's memory had happened

only a few months after his arrival at the Square House when a man had

taken him home on trial with the idea of adoption. Adoption, little

Bruce had gathered, was something like heaven,--a glorious and happy end

of all trouble and unpleasantness. Such was the idea he got from the

talk of the other Orphans, and even from the grown-ups who conducted the

establishment.

All the incidents and details of the excursion with this prospective

parent were extremely dim and vague. He did not know to what city he

went, nor had he any recollection whatever of the people he met there.

But he did remember, with remarkable clearness, the perplexing talk that

the man and the superintendent of the Square House had together on his

return.

"He won't do," the stranger had said. "I tried him out and he won't fill

in in my family. And I've fetched him back."

The superintendent must have looked at the little curly-haired boy with

considerable wonder; but he didn't ask questions. There was no

particular need of them. The man was quite ready to talk, and the fact

that a round-eyed child was listening to him with both ears open, did

not deter him a particle.

"I believe in being frank," the man said, "and I tell you there's

something vicious in that boy's nature. It came out the very first

moment he was in the house, when the Missus was introducing him to my

eight-year-old son. 'This is little Turner,' she said--and this boy

sprang right at him. I'd never let little Turner learn to fight, and

this boy was on top of him and was pounding him with his fists before we

could pull him off. Just like a wildcat--screaming and sobbing and

trying to get at him again. I didn't understand it at all."

Nor did the superintendent understand; nor--in these later years--Bruce

either.

He was quite a big boy, nearly ten, when he finally left the Square

House. And there was nothing flickering or dim about the memory of this

occasion.

A tall, exceedingly slender man sat beside the window,--a man well

dressed but with hard lines about his mouth and hard eyes. Yet the

superintendent seemed particularly anxious to please him. "You will like

this sturdy fellow," he said, as Bruce was ushered in.

The man's eyes traveled slowly from the child's curly head to his

rapidly growing feet; but no gleam of interest came into the thin face.

"I suppose he'll do--as good as any. It was the wife's idea, anyway, you

know. What about parentage? Anything decent at all?"

The superintendent seemed to wait a long time before answering. Little

Bruce, already full of secret conjectures as to his own parentage,

thought that some key might be given him at last. "There is nothing that

we can tell you, Mr. Duncan," he said at last. "A woman brought him

here--with an infant girl--when he was about four. I suppose she was

his mother--and she didn't wait to talk to me. The nurse said that she

wore outlandish clothes and had plainly had a hard time."

"But she didn't wait--?"

"She dropped her children and fled."

A cold little smile flickered at the man's lips.

"It looks rather damnable," he said significantly. "But I'll take the

little beggar--anyway."

And thus Bruce went to the cold fireside of the Duncans--a house in a

great and distant city where, in the years that had passed, many things

scarcely worth remembering had transpired. It was a gentleman's

house--as far as the meaning of the word usually goes--and Bruce had

been afforded a gentleman's education. There was also, for a while, a

certain amount of rather doubtful prosperity, a woman who died after a

few months of casual interest in him, and many, many hours of almost

overwhelming loneliness. Also there were many thoughts such as are not

especially good for the spirits of growing boys.

There is a certain code in all worlds that most men, sooner or later,

find it wisest to adopt. It is simply the code of forgetfulness. The

Square House from whence Bruce had come had been a good place to learn

this code; and Bruce--child though he was--had carried it with him to

the Duncans'. But there were two things he had been unable to forget.

One was the words his foster father had spoken on accepting him,--words

that at last he had come to understand.

A normal child, adopted into a good home, would not have likely given a

second thought to a dim and problematical disgrace in his unknown and

departed family. He would have found his pride in the achievements and

standing of his foster parents. But the trouble was that little Bruce

had not been adopted into any sort of home, good or bad. The place where

the Duncans lived was a house, but under no liberal interpretation of

the word could it be called a home. There was nothing homelike in it to

little Bruce. It wasn't that there was actual cruelty to contend with.

Bruce had never known that. But there was utter indifference which

perhaps is worse. And as always, the child filled up the empty space

with dreams. He gave all the love and worship that was in him to his own

family that he had pictured in imagination. Thus any disgrace that had

come upon them went home to him very straight indeed.

The other lasting memory was of Linda. She represented the one living

creature in all his assemblage of phantoms--the one person with whom he

could claim real kinship. Never a wind blew, never the sun shone but

that he missed her, with a terrible, aching longing for which no one has

ever been able to find words. He had done a bold thing, after his first

few years with the Duncans. He planned it long and carried it out with

infinite care as to details. He wrote to Linda, in care of the

superintendent of the orphanage.

The answer only deepened the mystery. Linda was missing. Whether she had

run away, or whether some one had come by in a closed car and carried

her off as she played on the lawns, the superintendent could not tell.

They had never been able to trace her. He had been fifteen then, a tall

boy with rather unusual muscular development, and the girl was eleven.

And in the year nineteen hundred and twenty, ten years after the reply

to his letter, Bruce had heard no word from her. A man grown, and his

boyish dreams pushed back into the furthest deep recesses of his mind,

where they could no longer turn his eyes away from facts, he had given

up all hope of ever hearing from her again. "My little sister," he said

softly to a memory. Then bitterness--a whole black flood of it--would

come upon him. "Good Lord, I don't even know that she _was_ my sister."

But now he was going to find her and his heart was full of joy and eager

anticipation.