The Wrong Twin

by Harry Leon Wilson

"No train out till the six-fifty-eight."

And Sam knew he would be meaning the six-fifty-eight of that same day. He never meant the day after, or the day after that.

That evening Dave sauntered down to the depot, accompanied by his son. There was no strained air of expectancy about him, and no tedious management of bags. He might have been seeking merely the refreshment of watching the six-fifty-eight come in and go out, as did a dozen or so of the more leisured class of Newbern. When the train came he greeted the conductor by his Christian name, and chatted with his son until it started. Then he stepped casually aboard and surrendered himself to its will. He had wanted suddenly to go somewhere on a train, and now he was going. "Got to see a man in San Diego," he had told the boy. "I'll drop back some of these days."

"Maybe you'll see the gypsies again," said Wilbur a bit wistfully.

But he was not cast down by his father's going; that was a thing that happened or not, like bad weather. He had learned this about his father. And pretty soon, after he went to school a little more and learned to spell better, to use punctuation marks the way the copy said, and capital letters even if you did have to reach for them, he, too, could swing onto the smoking car of the six-fifty-eight—after she had really started—and go off where gypsies went, and people that had learned good loose trades.

There was a new printer at the case in the Advance office the following morning, one of those who constantly drifted in and out of that exciting nowhere into which they so lightly disappeared by whim; a gaunt, silent man, almost wholly deaf, who stood in Dave Cowan's place and set type with machine-like accuracy or distributed it with loose-fingered nimbleness, seizing many types at a time and scattering them to their boxes with the apparent abandon of a sower strewing seed. He, too, was but a transient, wherever he might be found, but he had no talk of the outland where gypsies were, and to Wilbur he proved to be of no human interest, so that the boy neglected the dusty office for the more attractive out-of-doors, though still inking the forms for the Wednesday edition, because a quarter is a good thing to have.

When Terry Stamper brought the pail of beer now the new printer drank abundantly of the frothy stuff, and for a time glowed gently with a suggestive radiance, as if he, too, were almost moved to tell of strange cities; but he never did. Nor did he talk instructively about the beginnings of life and how humans were but slightly advanced simians. He would continue to set type, silent and detached, until an evening when he would want to go somewhere on a train—and go. He did not smoke, but he chewed tobacco; and Wilbur, the apprentice, desiring to do all things that printers did, strove to emulate him in this interesting vice; but it proved to offer only the weakest of appeals, so he presently abandoned the effort—especially after Winona had detected him with the stuff in his mouth, striving to spit like an elderly printer. Winona was horrified. Smoking was bad enough!

Winona was even opposed to his becoming a printer. Those advantages of the craft extolled by Dave Cowan were precisely what Winona deemed undesirable. A boy should rather be studious and of good habits and learn to write a good hand so that he could become a bookkeeper, perhaps even in the First National Bank itself—and always stay in one place. Winona disapproved of gypsies and all their ways. Gypsies were rolling stones. She strove to entice the better nature of Wilbur with moral placards bearing printed bits from the best authors. She gave him an entire calendar with an uplifting sentiment on each leaf. One paying proper attention could scarcely have lived the year of that calendar without being improved. Unfortunately, Wilbur Cowan never in the least cared to know what day in the month it was, and whole weeks of these homilies went unread. Winona was watchful, however, and fertile of resource. Aforetime she had devoted her efforts chiefly to Merle as being the better worth saving. Now that she had indeed saved him, made and uplifted him beyond human expectation, she redoubled her attentions to his less responsive, less plastic brother. Almost fiercely she was bent upon making him the moral perfectionist she had made Merle.

As one of the means to this end she regaled him often with tales of his brother's social and moral refulgence under his new name. The severance of Merle from his former environment had been complete. Not yet had he come back to see them. But Winona from church and Sunday-school brought weekly reports of his progress in the esteem of the family which he now adorned. Harvey D. Whipple was proud of his new son; had already come to feel a real fatherhood for him, and could deny him nothing. He was such a son as Harvey D. had hoped to have. Old Gideon Whipple, too, was proud of his new grandson. The stepmother, for whom Fate had been circumvented by this device of adoption, looked up to the boy and rejoiced in her roundabout motherhood, and Miss Murtree declared that he was a perfect little gentleman. Also, by her account, he was studious, with a natural fondness for the best in literature, and betrayed signs of an intellect such as, in her confidentially imparted opinion, the Whipple family, neither in root nor branch, had yet revealed. Patricia, the sister, had abandoned all intention of running away from home to obtain the right sort of companionship.

Winona meant to pique and inspire Wilbur to new endeavour with these tales, which, for a good purpose, she took the liberty of embellishing where they seemed to invite it—as how the Whipples were often heard to wish that the other twin had been as good and well-mannered a boy as Merle—who did not use tobacco in any form—so they might have adopted him, too. Winona was perhaps never to understand that Wilbur could not picture himself as despised and rejected. His assertion that he had not wished to be adopted by any Whipples she put down to envious bravado. Had he not from afar on more than one occasion beheld his brother riding the prophesied pony? But he would have felt embarrassed at meeting his brother now face to face. He liked to see him at a distance, on the wonderful pony, or being driven in the cart with other Whipples, and he felt a great pride that he should have been thus exalted. But he was shyly determined to have no contact with this splendid being.