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.

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