“Who is he? What is he?” I asked myself the question hourly. And there in the silence of those nights under the stars of the East, while we breathed the soft winds blowing across the sands the Pharaohs had trod, the answer came to me:
He was my other Half-Self—the twin half of my own Soul. This brother of mine—this being for whom I had a loathing deep and intense—was one in whom there lived an incomplete Soul (a half that was evil through and through) and mine was the other half. I was beginning now to understand. We had been sent into this world with but one Soul between us; and to me had been apportioned the good. But evil or good—good and evil—we were henceforth to be inseparable in our fate.
But always I cried out in my helpless, hopeless agony, “Yet why—why—why?” It is the cry of the Soul from the first day of creation.
I turned my back on the far East, and set my face towards America.
Then——
Then I started on a trip through California and old Mexico. My health was broken. My marriage with Lucille was postponed.
On the Nevada desert our train was side-tracked early one morning to allow the passing of the eastbound express which was late. A vast level plain stretched its weary way in every direction. Only the twin lines of steel and the dark-red section house showed that the White Man’s footsteps had ever found their way into the stillness of the dreary plains.
We had fifteen minutes to wait. I got out with others and walked up and down the wind-blown track, smoking my cigar and spinning pebbles, which I picked up from the road-bed, at a jack-rabbit in the sagebrush across the way. The wind made a mournful sound through the telegraph wires, but a wild canary sang sweetly from the top of a tall greasewood—sang as if to drown the wind’s dirge. Dull grays were about us; and we were hemmed in by mountains rugged, and rough, and dull gray, with here and there touches of dull reds and browns. On their very tops patches of snow lay, far—far up on the heights. Miles down the valley we could see the coming train. A few minutes later the conductor called to us “All aboard!” and I swung myself up on the steps of the last sleeping-car as we began to move slowly down toward the western end of the switch.
There was a roar and a clatter—a flash of faces at the windows—a rush of wind and dust whirled up by the whirling wheels—and, as the Eastern Express shot by, I saw (on the rear platform of the last car) him, between whom and myself a Soul was shared.