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!
VII
A THIRD STORY OF TWO BROTHERS
Stories of two brothers are common enough the world over - probably more
so than stories of young men who have fallen in love with their
grandmothers, and the main feature in most of them, as in the story I
have just told, is in the close resemblance of the two brothers, for on
that everything hinges.
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