Over the border

by Morgan Robertson

He struck the impassive boy round the legs. Partly from this, partly from the mention of his mother, the tears welled into his eyes, and, the barriers removed, the uprush overwhelmed him. Down on his face in the ash heap he fell, sobbing convulsively, while the unrestrained tears streamed through his fingers.

"Dead!" he said in a choked voice. "Dead, dead! Oh, father, she's dead! She's dead!"

The abashed stepfather stayed his hand. "I can't very well whip you, boy, if you feel like this," he said kindly. "I never thought you cared for your mother. You didn't take on like this when she died, nor for your sister. Come into the house when you're through crying. I don't like to hear you." The man went in, troubled in mind at having misjudged the boy.

The boy sobbed his aching heart dry on the ashes, then lifted his face, drawn, tear stained, and old—very old, for a boy. "Zenie!" he called softly. "Zenie, Zenie!" The voice rose to a wail. "Come back! Zenie, come back! Come back! Oh, God, send her back! Please send her back! Zenie, come back!" It ended in a cry of utter despair.

Then, close beside him, so close that it seemed almost within his ear, he heard a voice, clear and distinct, yet without sound or volume, say, "Yes, I will come."

He stood up and looked around. No one was there. He went out of the shed; but the back yard was empty. He went back to the ash heap, marveling to the extent that his benumbed faculties would permit; and as he sat there, a peace, a tranquillity, and a content that he had known only in her presence, came to him, and the dragging pain at his heart passed away.

Peace, tranquillity, and content are poor attributes with which to fight the battle of life. Being a boy, he soon worked clear of the shadow of death; but, without the helpful influences of his life he relapsed into the old shyness and indifference. Deprived of all that he had loved, he found nothing new to love; and, thus unreceptive, he ceased to respond to it when given and became unlovable. He lost ground in study, became sullen, suspicious, and at last incorrigible. When he had worn out his teachers' and his stepfather's patience, he left school ungraduated, with a scant knowledge of the lower studies to his credit. He went to work at driving a delivery wagon, and failed. Again and again he obtained work of this character, but could not hold his place.

Then his stepfather, after repeated advice and punishments, gave him up, furnished him with a suit of clothes and a sum of money, and turned him out. He sold papers for a time; but lost his money in this venture. He blacked boots at the few hotels of the small town, until this too proved a failure. He went off with a circus, and learned of real hardship and ill treatment; which embittered him the more. He drifted to New York, a newly fledged hobo, found the Bowery and its adjuncts, and, seventeen now, and grown nearly to full stature, he was in due time shanghaied aboard an outbound deep-water ship. At the end of the voyage he had learned to steer, to loose and furl a royal, and to get out of the way, which is all that is required of an ordinary seaman, and thus equipped the crimps saw to it that he signed again. Lacking in ambition and initiative, he remained at sea, and, compelled to learn, went through the grades of ordinary and able seaman, becoming in five years a competent boatswain of square-rigged ships.

Physically he developed into a man of iron, tall, straight, and symmetrical, brown as a Moor, and with his sullen stare changed to a meaningless frown. Mentally, except for the growth of a splendid professional courage, he remained at a standstill. He did not go backward. He read an occasional book, and the correctness of diction he had acquired at school remained with him, unspoiled by the associations of the forecastle. But he was a drifter, an ethical bankrupt, signing in ships picked by the boarding masters, robbed by them of his money, lending it when asked, or spending it with hopeless indifference, as resigned to the life he lived as any fatalist, and unable to realize that there might be a better within his reach; until, starved into a mental activity by a long passage on short rations, he moved himself sufficiently to secure a berth in one of the Atlantic liners, where good food was plentiful. Here his acquirements were of little use to him—he scrubbed paint by day and decks by night. But he came in contact with passengers.

Engaged with bucket and swab on a section of the after saloon one day, in the dull, apathetic frame of mind that was now natural with him, he noticed the approach of two passengers, a bewhiskered, peppery looking man of middle age, and an elderly woman with an unusually kind and sympathetic face.