The Turtles of Tasman | Page 3

There had been no warning of his
coming--a clatter of hoofs at midnight, a lathered horse in the stable,
and Tom had appeared, the salt of the sea on his face as his mother
attested. An hour only he remained, and on a fresh horse was gone,
while rain squalls rattled upon the windows and the rising wind
moaned through the redwoods, the memory of his visit a whiff, sharp
and strong, from the wild outer world. A week later, sea-hammered and
bar-bound for that time, had arrived the revenue cutter Bear, and there
had been a column of conjecture in the local paper, hints of a heavy
landing of opium and of a vain quest for the mysterious schooner
Halcyon. Only Fred and his mother, and the several house Indians,
knew of the stiffened horse in the barn and of the devious way it was
afterward smuggled back to the fishing village on the beach.
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