The ex-schoolmaster took hold of both of her hands, there in the crowded, moving throngs of Chinatown, saying: “I came in from China today, after what I thought was a hopeless search for you. Years ago, after our separation, a Chinaman showed me how to visit China in my dreams, and be close to you. It took a whole lot of mental concentration, was pulling me down physically. I kept it up too long, for one night I dreamed I was in a terrible earthquake. It was so vivid that my physical as well as my spiritual being was translated to China, and I found myself there penniless. But, search as I may, I could not find you. If I died in the oil regions, it must have been another physical self, shed as a snake does his skin, for the Lambert Girtin who stands before you is fully alive, and resolved never to part from you again.”
JESSE LOGAN, PENNSYLVANIA INDIAN CHIEF
(Photograph Taken 1915 by P. C. Hockenberry)
Old memories came to Elsie Vanneman, conquering her fears, and her face flushed as in schoolgirl days: "You speak of our ‘separation’–pray, tell me more about it; why did you leave me so abruptly and run away that Christmas Eve after meeting? I could never understand why you did not even come to wish me a ‘Merry Christmas’ the next day. Why didn’t you ever write me a line? What did I do to merit such neglect?"
“What did you do?” replied Girtin, drawing her aside from the passing stream of pig-tailed humanity into a shadowy doorway. “It doesn’t seem very serious now, but it hurt me a whole lot at the time. You told me you had an engagement with some one to see you in from church, and I was angry and jealous, for I had been imagining that your thoughts had only been of me, that you cared for no one else.” “replied the girl with alacrity.
Girtin turned as pale as death; his sufferings, mental and physical, his wanderings, physical and actual, his wasted years, all had been caused by a misunderstanding. He was at a loss for words for some time, but he held on to Elsie’s hands, looking into her beautiful, ethereal face, the vari-colored light of a Chinese lantern shining down on her coppery-gold hair.
“Do you care for me at all, now?” he said, at length.
“Yes, I think I do; I must, or I would not have came back all the way from China to hunt you,” she answered.
“Then we have both suffered,” he said, sadly. “What shall we do now?” “she said.
“That’s where I want to go,” he replied, “if I can ever live down that dying story in Pithole City.” “said Elsie. "There was a case in our valley of a soldier reported as killed at Gettysburg; they sent his body home, began paying his widow a pension; she married a former sweetheart, and then, worse than ‘Enoch Arden,’ he appeared as if from the grave. He had no explanations to make, and our mountain people asked no questions, all having faith in supernatural things. Neither will I ask any of you. I have seen too much in the east to make me disbelieve anything, or that we can die two or three times under stress of circumstances, shedding our physical selves–to use your[your] words–as snakes do their skins. I am only happy I did not marry some one else, as I was tempted to do when I imagined you were engulfed in the earthquake."