- 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.
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