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ld rush together, catch hold of a fragment of her picture, and like a chain-gang of ants carrying a straw, come lugging it up for him to see. It was only a fleeting glimpse, only the faintest blur in half-tone, and then quite gone. Yet he never gave up trying. He never quit longing for just one second of vivid remembrance. It was one of the few and really great desires that Bruce had in life.
The few times that her memory-picture did come to him, it brought a number of things with it. One of them was a great and overwhelming realization of some terrible tragedy and terror the nature of which he could not even guess. There had been terrible and tragic events--where and how he could not guess--lost in those forgotten days of his babyhood.
The Woman had kissed him and gone quickly; and he had been too young to remember if she had carried any sort of bundle close to her breast. Yet, the man considered, there must have been such a bundle--otherwise he couldn't possibly account for Linda. And there were no doubts about her, at all. Her picture was always on the first page of the photograph album of his memory; he had only to turn over one little sheet of years to find her.
Of course he had no memories of her that first day, nor for the first years. But all later memories of the Square House always included her. She must have been nearly four years younger than himself; thus when he was taken to the house she was only an infant. But thereafter, the nurses put them together often; and when Linda was able to talk, she called him something that sounded like Bwovaboo. She called him that so often that for a long time he couldn't be sure that wasn't his real name. Now, in manhood, he interpreted.
"Brother Bruce, of course. Linda was of course a sister."
She had been angry at him times in plenty--over some childish game--and he remembered how that light had grown and brightened. She had flung at him too, like a lynx springing from a tree. Bruce paused in his reflections to wonder at himself over the simile--for lynx were no especial acquaintances of his. He knew them only through books, as he knew many other things that stirred his imagination. But he laughed at the memory of her sudden, explosive ferocity,--the way her hands had smacked against his cheeks, and her sharp little nails had scratched him. Curiously, he had never fought back as is the usual thing between small boys and small girls. And it wasn't exactly chivalry either, rather just an inability to feel resentment. Besides, there were always tears and repentance afterward, and certain pettings that he openly scorned and secretly loved.
"I must have been a strange kid!" Bruce thought.
It was true he had; and nothing was stranger than this attitude toward Baby Sister. He was always so gentle with her, but at the same time he contemplated her with a sort of amused tolerance that is to be expected in strong men rather than solemn little boys. "Little Spitfire" he sometimes called her; but no one else could call her anything but Linda. For Bruce had been an able little fighter, even in those days.
There was other evidence of strangeness. He was fond of drawing pictures. This was nothing in itself; many little boys are fond of drawing pictures. Nor were his unusually good. Their strangeness lay in his subjects. He liked to draw animals in particular,--the animals he read about in school and in such books as were brought to him. And sometimes he drew Indians and cowboys. And one day--when he wasn't half watching what he was doing--he drew something quite different.
Perhaps he wouldn't have looked at it twice, if the teacher hadn't stepped up behind him and taken it out of his hands. It was "geography" then, not "drawing", and he should have been "paying attention." And he had every reason to think that the teacher would crumple up his picture and send him to the cloak-room for punishment.
But she did no such thing. It was true that she seized the paper, and her fingers were all set to crumple it. But when her eyes glanced down, her fingers slowly straightened. Then she looked again--carefully.
"What is this, Bruce?" she asked. "What have you been drawing?"
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