What that meeting was, no one can say. She found him there surrounded by those who were his nearest and dearest—a brown-skinned wife and little bronze bairns—his! She stood face to face with him—she clasped hands with him; yet a lifetime and all the world lay between. Children of the loins of one father—born of the same mother—these two had nothing in common between them—nothing—save the yearning for a something that was always to lie just beyond.
He yielded to her persuasions and went home with her to see the city by the sea of which he had heard much, but knew nothing. It was a visit of but a few days; yet in that time no hour struck for each alike. Try as each would for a feeling of kinship, the other was ever a stranger.
She showed him the sights of the city, but he was more and more bewildered by what he saw. At the beach it was better; he seemed to understand the ocean best, though seeing it for the first time. She sought to awaken in him an interest in the things of her world. And to his credit be it said, he honestly tried to respond in the way she would have him.
But up and away to the Northeast was all he had interest in or heart for; and so at the end of a week he went back. Going, he pledged himself to come to her every third year for a week’s stay; for “blood is thicker than water,” and though they might never strike the same chord, yet, after all, she was his sister.
The years wax and wane. Every third one brings in fulfillment of the promise, the very commonplace-looking brother who is something of a mystery to her metropolitan friends. Time has brought brother and sister a little more closely together, but it will never bridge the chasm. Always there is a restraint, a reserve, which comes from a common knowledge that there are things in his past life he may not tell—yet, which she guesses with an unspoken, unnamed fear.
Once (when the bronze-brown woman was dead), he tried to accept civilized life as a finality. The month had not rounded out to fullness when each saw the futility of the attempt.
Back on the rough Oregon mountains were sons and daughters, “flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone,” brown-skinned though they were; and he turned his back on the White Man and his unfamiliar ways, and set his face toward those whom he knew best and loved.
Somehow, you like and respect the man for going, as you couldn’t had he stayed.
The story reads like fiction, doesn’t it? But the pity of it is that it is true.
