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.
III
There had not been time to make inquiry as to the land Bruce was going to. He only knew one thing,—that it was the wilderness. Whether it was a wilderness of desert or of great forest, he did not know. Nor had he the least idea what manner of adventure would be his after he reached the old woman's cabin; and he didn't care. The fact that he had no business plans for the future and no financial resources except a few hundred dollars that he carried in his pocket did not matter one way or another. He was willing to spend all the money he had; after it was gone, he would take up some work in life anew.
He had a moment's wonder at the effect his departure would have upon the financial problem that had been his father's sole legacy to him. He laughed a little as he thought of it. Perhaps a stronger man could have taken hold, could have erected some sort of a structure upon the ruins, and remained to conquer after all. But Bruce had never been particularly adept at business. His temperament did not seem suited to it. But the idea that others also—having no business relations with his father—might be interested in this western journey of his did not even occur to him. He would not be missed at his athletic club. He had scarcely any real friends, and none of his acquaintances kept particularly close track of him.
But the paths men take, seemingly with wholly different aims, crisscross and become intertwined much more than Bruce knew. Even as he lay in his berth, the first sweet drifting of sleep upon him, he was the subject of a discussion in a far-distant mountain home; and sleep would not have fallen so easily and sweetly if he had heard it.
It might have been a different world. Only a glimpse of it, illumined by the moon, could be seen through the soiled and besmirched window pane; but that was enough to tell the story. There were no tall buildings, lighted by a thousand electric lights, such as Bruce could see through the windows of his bedroom at night. The lights that could be discerned in this strange, dark sky were largely unfamiliar to Bruce, because of the smoke-clouds that had always hung above the city where he lived. There were just stars, but there were so many of them that the mind was unable to comprehend their number.
There is a perplexing variation in the appearance of these twinkling spheres. No man who has traveled widely can escape this fact. Likely enough they are the same stars, but they put on different faces. They seem almost insignificant at times,—dull and dim and unreal. It is not this way with the stars that peer down through these high forests. Men cannot walk beneath them and be unaware of them. They are incredibly large and bright and near, and the eyes naturally lift to them. There are nights in plenty, in the wild places, where they seem much more real than the dim, moonlit ridge or even the spark of a trapper's campfire, far away. They grow to be companions, too, in time. Perhaps after many, many years in the wild a man even attains some understanding of them, learning their infinite beneficence, and finding in them rare comrades in loneliness, and beacons on the dim and intertwining trails.
There was also a moon that cast a little square of light, like a fairy tapestry, on the floor. It was not such a moon as leers down red and strange through the smoke of cities. It was vivid and quite white,—the wilderness moon that times the hunting hours of the forest creatures. But the patch that it cast on the floor was obscured in a moment because the man who had been musing in the big chair beside the empty fireplace had risen and lighted a kerosene lamp.