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Page 3
Despite those twenty years, it was the same old Tom Travers that
alighted from the Pullman. To his brother's eyes, he did not look sick.
Older he was of course. The Panama hat did not hide the grey hair, and
though indefinably hinting of shrunkenness, the broad shoulders were
still broad and erect. As for the young woman with him, Frederick
Travers experienced an immediate shock of distaste. He felt it vitally,
yet vaguely. It was a challenge and a mock, yet he could not name nor
place the source of it. It might have been the dress, of tailored linen
and foreign cut, the shirtwaist, with its daring stripe, the black
wilfulness of the hair, or the flaunt of poppies on the large straw hat
or it might have been the flash and colour of her--the black eyes and
brows, the flame of rose in the cheeks, the white of the even teeth that
showed too readily. "A spoiled child," was his thought, but he had no
time to analyse, for his brother's hand was in his and he was making his
niece's acquaintance.
There it was again. She flashed and talked like her colour, and she
talked with her hands as well. He could not avoid noting the smallness
of them. They were absurdly small, and his eyes went to her feet to make
the same discovery. Quite oblivious of the curious crowd on the station
platform, she had intercepted his attempt to lead to the motor car and
had ranged the brothers side by side. Tom had been laughingly
acquiescent, but his younger brother was ill at ease, too conscious of
the many eyes of his townspeople. He knew only the old Puritan way.
Family displays were for the privacy of the family, not for the public.
He was glad she had not attempted to kiss him. It was remarkable she had
not. Already he apprehended anything of her.
She embraced them and penetrated them with sun-warm eyes that seemed to
see through them, and over them, and all about them.
"You're really brothers," she cried, her hands flashing with her eyes.
"Anybody can see it. And yet there is a difference--I don't know. I
can't explain."
In truth, with a tact that exceeded Frederick Travers' farthest
disciplined forbearance, she did not dare explain. Her wide artist-eyes
had seen and sensed the whole trenchant and essential difference. Alike
they looked, of the unmistakable same stock, their features reminiscent
of a common origin; and there resemblance ceased. Tom was three inches
taller, and well-greyed was the long, Viking moustache. His was the same
eagle-like nose as his brother's, save that it was more eagle-like,
while the blue eyes were pronouncedly so. The lines of the face were
deeper, the cheek-bones higher, the hollows larger, the weather-beat
darker. It was a volcanic face. There had been fire there, and the fire
still lingered. Around the corners of the eyes were more
laughter-wrinkles and in the eyes themselves a promise of deadlier
seriousness than the younger brother possessed. Frederick was bourgeois
in his carriage, but in Tom's was a certain careless ease and
distinction. It was the same pioneer blood of Isaac Travers in both men,
but it had been retorted in widely different crucibles. Frederick
represented the straight and expected line of descent. His brother
expressed a vast and intangible something that was unknown in the
Travers stock. And it was all this that the black-eyed girl saw and knew
on the instant. All that had been inexplicable in the two men and their
relationship cleared up in the moment she saw them side by side.
"Wake me up," Tom was saying. "I can't believe I arrived on a train. And
the population? There were only four thousand thirty years ago."
"Sixty thousand now," was the other's answer. "And increasing by leaps
and bounds. Want to spin around for a look at the city? There's plenty
of time."
As they sped along the broad, well-paved streets, Tom persisted in his
Rip Van Winkle pose. The waterfront perplexed him. Where he had once
anchored his sloop in a dozen feet of water, he found solid land and
railroad yards, with wharves and shipping still farther out.
"Hold on! Stop!" he cried, a few blocks on, looking up at a solid
business block. "Where is this, Fred?"
"Fourth and Travers--don't you remember?"
Tom stood up and gazed around, trying to discern the anciently familiar
configuration of the land under its clutter of buildings.
"I ... I think...." he began hesitantly. "No; by George, I'm sure of it.
We used to hunt cottontails over that ground, and shoot blackbirds in
the brush. And there, where the bank building is, was a pond." He turned
to Polly. "I built my first raft there, and got my first taste of the
sea."
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