shortly after writing the story of two brothers in the last part but one i was reminded of another strange story of two brothers in that same distant land, which i heard years ago and had forgotten. it now came back to me in a newspaper from miami, of all places in the world, sent me by a correspondent in that town. he—mr. j. l. rodger—some time ago when reading an autobiographical book of mine made the discovery that we were natives of the same place in the argentine pampas—that the homes where we respectively first saw the light stood but a couple of hours' ride on horseback apart. but we were not born on the same day and so missed meeting in our youth; then left our homes, and he, after wide wanderings, found an earthly paradise in florida to dwell in. so that now that we have in a sense met we have the atlantic between us. he has been contributing some recollections of the pampas to the miami paper, and told this story of two brothers among other strange happenings. i tell it in my own way more briefly.
it begins in the early fifties and ends thirty years later in the early eighties of last century. it then found its way into the buenos ayres newspapers, and i heard it at the time but had utterly forgotten it until this florida paper came into my hand.
in the fifties a mr. gilmour, a scotch settler, had a sheep and cattle ranch on the pampas far south of buenos ayres, near the atlantic coast. he lived there with his family, and one of the children, aged five, was a bright active little fellow and was regarded with affection by one of the hired native cattlemen, who taught the child to ride on a pony, and taught him so well that even at that tender age the boy could follow his teacher and guide at a fast gallop over the plain. one day mr. gilmour fell out with the man on account of some dereliction of duty, and after some hot words between them discharged him there and then. the young fellow mounted his horse and rode off vowing vengeance, and on that very day the child disappeared. the pony on which he had gone out riding came home, and as it was supposed that the little boy had been thrown or fallen off, a search was made all over the estate and continued for days without result. eventually some of the child's clothing was found on the beach, and it was conjectured that the young native had taken the child there and drowned him and left the clothes to let the gilmours know that he had had his revenge. but there was room for doubt, as the body was never found, and they finally came to think that the clothes had been left there to deceive them, and that as the man had been so fond of the child he had carried him off. this belief started them on a wider and longer quest; they invoked the aid of the authorities all over the province; the loss of the child was advertised and a large reward offered for his recovery and agents were employed to look for him. in this search, which continued for years, mr. gilmour spent a large part of his fortune, and eventually it had to be dropped; and of all the family mrs. gilmour alone still believed that her lost son was living, and still dreamed and hoped that she would see him again before her life ended.
one day the gilmours entertained a traveller, a native gentleman, who, as the custom was in my time on those great vacant plains where houses were far apart, had ridden up to the gate at noon and asked for hospitality. he was a man of education, a great traveller in the land, and at table entertained them with an account of some of the strange out-of-the-world places he had visited.
presently one of the sons of the house, a tall slim good-looking young man of about thirty, came in, and saluting the stranger took his seat at the table. their guest started and seemed to be astonished at the sight of him, and after the conversation was resumed he continued from time to time to look with a puzzled questioning air at the young man. mrs. gilmour had observed this in him and, with the thought of her lost son ever in her mind, she became more and more agitated until, unable longer to contain her excitement, she burst out: "o, señor, why do you look at my son in that way?—tell me if by chance you have not met someone in your wanderings that was like him."
yes, he replied, he had met someone so like the young man before him that it had almost produced the illusion of his being the same person; that was why he had looked so searchingly at him.
then in reply to their eager questions he told them that it was an old incident, that he had never spoken a word to the young man he had seen, and that he had only seen him once for a few minutes. the reason of his remembering him so well was that he had been struck by his appearance, so strangely incongruous in the circumstances, and that had made him look very sharply at him. over two years had passed since, but it was still distinct in his memory. he had come to a small frontier settlement, a military outpost, on the extreme north-eastern border of the republic, and had seen the garrison turn out for exercise from the fort. it was composed of the class of men one usually saw in these border forts, men of the lowest type, miztiros and mulattos most of them, criminals from the gaols condemned to serve in the frontier army for their crimes. and in the midst of the low-browed, swarthy-faced, ruffianly crew appeared the tall distinguished-looking young man with a white skin, blue eyes and light hair—an amazing contrast!
that was all he could tell them, but it was a clue, the first they had had in thirty years, and when they told the story of the lost child to their guest he was convinced that it was their son he had seen—there could be no other explanation of the extraordinary resemblance between the two young men. at the same time he warned them that the search would be a difficult and probably a disappointing one, as these frontier garrisons were frequently changed: also that many of the men deserted whenever they got the chance, and that many of them got killed, either in fight with the indians, or among themselves over their cards, as gambling was their only recreation.
but the old hope, long dead in all of them except in the mother's heart, was alive again, and the son, whose appearance had so strongly attracted their guest's attention, at once made ready to go out on that long journey. he went by way of buenos ayres where he was given a passport by the war office and a letter to the commanding officer to discharge the blue-eyed soldier in the event of his being found and proved to be a brother to the person in quest of him. but when he got to the end of his journey on the confines of that vast country, after travelling many weeks on horseback, it was only to hear that the men who had formed the garrison two years before, had been long ordered away to another province where they had probably been called to aid in or suppress a revolutionary outbreak, and no certain news could be had of them. he had to return alone but not to drop the search; it was but the first of three great attempts he made, and the second was the most disastrous, when in a remote province and a lonely district he met with a serious accident which kept him confined in some poor hovel for many months, his money all spent, and with no means of communicating with his people. he got back at last; and after recruiting his health and providing himself with funds, and obtaining fresh help from the war office, he set out on his third venture; and at the end of three years from the date of his first start, he succeeded in finding the object of his search, still serving as a common soldier in the army. that they were brothers there was no doubt in either of their minds, and together they travelled home.
and now the old father and mother had got their son back, and they told him the story of the thirty years during which they had lamented his loss, and of how at last they had succeeded in recovering him:—what had he to tell them in return? it was a disappointing story. for, to begin with, he had no recollection of his child life at home—no faintest memory of mother or father or of the day when the sudden violent change came and he was forcibly taken away. his earliest recollection was of being taken about by someone—a man who owned him, who was always at the cattle-estates where he worked, and how this man treated him kindly until he was big enough to be set to work shepherding sheep and driving cattle, and doing anything a boy could do at any place they lived in, and that his owner and master then began to be exacting and tyrannical, and treated him so badly that he eventually ran away and never saw the man again. and from that time onward he lived much the same kind of life as when with his master, constantly going about from place to place, from province to province, and finally he had for some unexplained reason been taken into the army.
that was all—the story of his thirty years of wild horseback life told in a few dry sentences! could more have been expected! the mother had expected more and would not cease to expect it. he was her lost one found again, the child of her body who in his long absence had gotten a second nature; but it was nothing but a colour, a garment, which would wear thinner and thinner, and by-and-by reveal the old deeper ineradicable nature beneath. so she imagined, and would take him out to walk to be with him, to have him all to herself, to caress him, and they would walk, she with an arm round his neck or waist; and when she released him or whenever he could make his escape from the house, he would go off to the quarters of the hired cattlemen and converse with them. they were his people, and he was one of them in soul in spite of his blue eyes, and like one of them he could lasso or break a horse and throw a bull and put a brand on him, and kill a cow and skin it, or roast it in its hide if it was wanted so; and he could do a hundred other things, though he couldn't read a book, and i daresay he found it a very misery to sit on a chair in the company of those who read in books and spoke a language that was strange to him—the tongue he had himself spoken as a child!
