The Wrong Twin by Harry Leon Wilson

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THE WRONG TWIN

BY HARRY LEON WILSON

1921

TO HELEN AND LEON

[Illustration: "THE GIRL NOW GLOWERED AT EACH OF THEM IN TURN. 'I DON'T
CARE!' SHE MUTTERED. 'I WILL, TOO, RUN AWAY!'"]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"The girl now glowered at each of them in turn. 'I don't care!' she
muttered. 'I will, too, run away!'"

"'I can always find a little time for bankers. I never kept one waiting
yet and I won't begin now.'"

"The girl was already reading Wilbur's palm, disclosing to him that he
had a deep vein of cruelty in his nature."

"The malign eye was worn so proudly that the wearer bubbled
vaingloriously of how he had achieved the stigma."

CHAPTER I

An establishment in Newbern Center, trading under the name of the Foto
Art Shop, once displayed in its window a likeness of the twin sons of
Dave Cowan. Side by side, on a lavishly fringed plush couch, they
confronted the camera with differing aspects. One sat forward with a
decently, even blandly, composed visage, nor had he meddled with his
curls. His mate sat back, scowling, and fought the camera to the bitter
end. His curls, at the last moment, had been mussed by a raging hand.

This was in the days of an earlier Newbern, when the twins were four and
Winona Penniman began to be their troubled mentor--troubled lest they
should not grow up to be refined persons; a day when Dave Cowan, the
widely travelled printer, could rightly deride its citizenry as
small-towners; a day when the Whipples were Newbern's sole noblesse and
the Cowan twins not yet torn asunder.

The little town lay along a small but potent river that turned a few
factory wheels with its eager current, and it drew sustenance from the
hill farms that encircled it for miles about. You had to take a dingy
way train up to the main line if you were going the long day's journey
to New York, so that the Center of the name was often construed
facetiously by outlanders.

Now Newbern Center is modern, and grows callous. Only the other day a
wandering biplane circled the second nine of its new golf course, and of
the four players on the tenth green but one paid it the tribute of an
upward glance. Even this was a glance of resentment, for his partner at
that instant eyed the alignment for a three-foot putt and might be
distracted. The annoyed player flung up a hostile arm at the thing and
waved it from the course. Seemingly abashed, the machine slunk off into
a cloud bank.

Old Sharon Whipple, the player who putted, never knew that above him had
gone a thing he had very lately said could never be. Sharon has grown
modern with the town. Not so many years ago he scoffed at rumours of a
telephone. He called it a contraption, and said it would be against the
laws of God and common sense. Later he proscribed the horseless carriage
as an impracticable toy. Of flying he had affirmed that the fools who
tried it would deservedly break their necks, and he had gustily raged at
the waste of a hundred and seventy-five acres of good pasture land when
golf was talked.

Yet this very afternoon the inconsequent dotard had employed a telephone
to summon his car to transport him to the links, and had denied even a
glance of acknowledgment at the wonder floating above him. Much like
that is growing Newbern. There was gasping aplenty when Winona Penniman
abandoned the higher life and bought a flagrant pair of satin dancing
slippers, but now the town lets far more sensational doings go almost
unremarked.

The place tosses even with the modern fever of unrest. It has its
bourgeoisie, its proletariat, its radicals, but also a city-beautiful
association and a rather captious sanitary league. Lately a visiting
radical, on the occasion of a certain patriotic celebration, expressed a
conventional wish to spit upon the abundantly displayed flag. A knowing
friend was quick to dissuade him.

"Don't do it! Don't try it! Here, now, you got no freedom! Should you
spit only on their sidewalk, they fine the heart's blood out of you."

* * * * *

Midway between these periods of very early and very late Newbern there
was once a shining summer morning on which the Cowan twins, being then
nine years old, set out from the Penniman home to pick wild
blackberries along certain wooded lanes that environed the town. They
were bare-footed, wearing knee pants buttoned to calico waists, these
being patterned with small horseshoes which the twins had been told by
their father would bring them good luck. They wore cloth caps, and
carried tin pails for their berries. These would be sold to the
Pennimans at an agreed price of five cents a quart, and it was Winona's
hope that the money thus earned on a beautiful Saturday morning would on
Sunday be given to the visiting missionary lately returned from China.
Winona had her doubts, however, chiefly of Wilbur Cowan's keenness for
proselyting, on his own income, in foreign lands. Too often with money
in hand, he had yielded to the grosser tyranny of the senses.

The twins ran races in the soft dust of the highway until they reached
the first outlying berry patch. Here they became absorbed in their work.
They were finding well-laden bushes along the fence of what to-day is
known as the old graveyard.

Newbern now has a sophisticated new cemetery, with carved marble and
tall shafts of polished granite, trimmed shrubs, and garnished mounds,
contrasting--as the newer town to the old--with the dingy inclosure
where had very simply been inhumed the dead of that simpler day. In the
new cemetery blackberry bushes would not be permitted. Along the older
plot they flourished. The place itself is over-grown with rank grasses,
with ivy run wild, with untended shrubs, often hiding the memorials,
which are mostly of brown sandstone or gray slate. It lies in deep
shadow under cypress and willow. It is very still under the gloom of its
careless growths--a place not reassuring to the imaginative.

The bottoms of the tin pails had been covered with berries found outside
the board fence, and now a hunt for other laden bushes led the twins to
a trove of ripened fruit partly outside and partly inside that plot
where those of old Newbern had been chested and laid unto their fathers.
There was, of course, no question as to the ownership of that fruit out
here. It was any one's. There followed debate on a possible right to
that which grew abundantly beyond the fence. By some strange but not
unprecedented twisting of the mature mind of authority, might it not
belong to those inside, or to those who had put them there? Further,
would Mrs. Penniman care to make pies of blackberries--even the largest
and ripest yet found--that had grown in a graveyard?

"They taste just the same," announced the Wilbur twin, having, after a
cautious survey, furtively reached through two boards of the fence to
retrieve a choice cluster.

"I guess nobody would want 'em that owns 'em," conceded Wilbur.

"Well, you climb over first."

"We better both go together at the same time."

"No, one of us better try it first and see; then, if it's all right,
I'll climb over, too."

"Aw, I know a better patch up over West Hill in the Whipple woods."

"What you afraid of? Nobody would care about a few old blackberries."

"I ain't afraid."

"You act like it, I must say. If you wasn't afraid you'd climb that
fence pretty quick, wouldn't you? Looky, the big ones!"

The Wilbur twin reflected on this. It sounded plausible. If he wasn't
afraid, of course he would climb that fence pretty quick. It stood to
reason. It did not occur to him that any one else was afraid. He decided
that neither was he.

"Well, I'm afraid of things that ain't true that scare you in the dark,"
he admitted, "but I ain't afraid like that now. Not one bit!"

"Well, I dare you to go."

"Well, of course I'll go. I was just resting a minute. I got to rest a
little, haven't I?"

"Well, I guess you're rested. I guess you can climb a plain and simple
fence, can't you? You can rest over there, can't you--just as well as
what you can rest here?"

The resting one looked up and down the lane, then peered forward into
the shadowy tangle of green things with its rows of headstones. Then,
inhaling deeply, he clambered to the top of the fence and leaped to the
ground beyond.

"Gee, gosh!" he cried, for he had landed on a trailing branch of
blackberry vine.

He sat down and extracted a thorn from the leathery sole of his bare
foot. The prick of the thorn had cleaned his mind of any merely fanciful
fears. A surpassing lot of berries was there for the bold to take. His
brother stared not too boldly through the fence at the pioneer.

"Go on and try picking some," he urged in the subdued tones of extreme
caution.

The other calmly set to work. The watcher awaited some mysterious
punishment for this desecration. Presently, nothing having happened, he
glowed with a boldness of his own and mounted to the top of the fence,
where he again waited. He whistled, affecting to be at ease, but with a
foot on the safe side of the fence. The busy worker inside paid him no
attention. Presently Merle yawned.

"Well, I guess I'll come in there myself and pick a few berries," he
said very loudly.

He was giving fair notice to any malign power that might be waiting to
blast him. After a fitting interval, he joined his brother and fell to
work.

"Well, I must say!" he chattered. "Who's afraid to come into a graveyard
when they can get berries like this? We can fill the pails, and that's
thirty cents right here."

The fruit fell swiftly. The Wilbur twin worked in silence. But Merle
appeared rather to like the sound of a human voice. He was aimlessly
loquacious. His nerves were not entirely tranquil.

"They're growing right over this old one," announced Wilbur presently.
Merle glanced up to see him despoiling a bush that embowered one of the
brown headstones and an all but obliterated mound.

"You better be careful," he warned.

"I guess I'm careful enough for this old one," retorted the bolder
twin, and swept the trailing bush aside to scan the stone. It was
weather-worn and lichened, but the carving was still legible.

"It says, 'Here lies Jonas Whipple, aged eighty-seven,' and it says, 'he
passed to his reward April 23, 1828,' and here's his picture."

He pointed to the rounded top of the stone where was graven a circle
inclosing primitive eyes, a nose, and mouth. From the bottom of the
circle on either side protruded wings.

Merle drew near to scan the device. He was able to divine that the
intention of the artist had not been one of portraiture.

"That ain't either his picture," he said, heatedly. "That's a cupid!"

"Ho, gee, gosh! Ain't cupids got legs? Where's its legs?"

"Then it's an angel."

"Angels are longer. I know now--it's a goop. And here's some more
reading."

He ran his fingers along the worn lettering, then brought his eyes close
and read--glibly in the beginning:

Behold this place as you pass by.
As you are now, so once was I.
As I am now, so you must be.
Prepare for death, and follow me.

The reader's voice lost in fullness and certainty as he neared the end
of this strophe.

"Say, we better get right out of here," said Merle, stepping toward the
fence. Even Wilbur was daunted by the blunt warning from beyond.

"Here's another," called Merle, pausing on his way toward the fence. In
hushed, fearful tones he declaimed:

Dear companion in your bloom,
Behold me moldering in the tomb,
For
Death is a debt to Nature due,
Which I have paid, and so must you.

"There, now, I must say!" called Merle. "We better hurry out!"

But the Wilbur twin lingered. Ripe berries still glistened about the
stone of the departed Jonas Whipple.

"Aw, gee, gosh, they're just old ones!" he declared. "It says this one
passed to his reward in 1828, and we wasn't born then, so he couldn't be
meaning us, could he? We ain't passed to our reward yet, have we? I
simply ain't going to pay the least attention to it."

A bit nervously he fell again to picking the berries. The mere feel of
them emboldened him.

"Gee, gosh! We ain't followed him yet, have we?"

"'As I am now, so you must be!'" quoted the other in warning.

"Well, my sakes, don't everyone in town know that? But it don't mean
we're going to be--be it--right off."

"You better come just the samey!"

But the worker was stubborn.

"Ho, I guess I ain't afraid of any old Whipple as old as what this one
is!"

"Well, anyway," called Merle, still in hushed tones, "I guess I got
enough berries from this place."

"Aw, come on!" urged the worker.

In a rush of bravado he now extemporized a chant of defiance:

Old Jonas Whipple
Was an old cripple!
Old Jonas Whipple
Was an old cripple!

The Merle twin found this beyond endurance. He leaped for the fence and
gained its top, looking back with a blanched face to see the offender
smitten. He wanted to go at once, but this might be worth waiting for.

Wilbur continued to pick berries. Again he chanted loudly, mocking the
solemnities of eternity:

Old Jonas Whipple
Was an old cripple!
Was an old--

The mockery died in his throat, and he froze to a statue of fear. Beyond
the headstone of Jonas Whipple, and toward the centre of the plot, a
clump of syringa was plainly observed to sway with the movements of a
being unseen.

"I told you!" came the hoarse whisper of Merle, but he, too, was chained
by fright to the fence top.

They waited, breathless, in the presence of the king of terrors. Again
the bush swayed with a sinister motion. A deeper hush fell about them;
the breeze died and song birds stilled their notes. A calamity was
imminent. Neither watcher now doubted that a mocked Jonas Whipple would
terribly issue from the tangle of shrubbery.

The bushes were again agitated; then at the breaking, point of fear for
the Cowan twins the emergent figure proved to be not Jonas but a
trifling and immature female descendant of his, who now sped rapidly
toward them across the intervening glade, nor were the low mounds sacred
to her in her progress. Her short shirt of a plaid gingham flopped above
her thin, bony legs as she ran, and she grasped a wide-brimmed straw hat
in one hand.

* * * * *

It should be said that this girl appalled the twins hardly less than
would an avenging apparition of the outraged Jonas Whipple. Beings of a
baser extraction, they had looked upon Whipples only from afar and with
awe. Upon this particular Whipple they had looked with especial awe.
Other known members of the tribe were inhumanly old and gray and
withered, not creatures with whom the most daring fancy could picture
the Cowan twins sustaining any sane human relationship. But this one was
young and moderately understandable. Observed from across the room of
the Methodist Sunday-school, she was undoubtedly human like them; but
always so befurbished with rare and shining garments, with glistening
silks and costly velvets and laces, with bonnets of pink rosebuds and
gloves of kid, that the thought of any secular relationship had been
preposterous. Yet she was young, an animal of their own age, whose ways
could be comprehended.

She halted her mad flight when she discovered them, then turned to
survey the way she had come. She was panting. The twins regarded her
stonily, shaping defenses if she brought up anything regarding any one
who might have mocked Jonas Whipple.

When again she could breathe evenly, she said: "It was Cousin Juliana
driving by was why I dashed in here. I think I have foiled her."

She was not now the creature of troubled elegance that Sabbaths had
revealed her. The gingham dress was such as a daughter of the people
might have worn, and the straw hat, though beribboned, was not
impressive. She was a bony little girl, with quick, greenish eyes and a
meagre pigtail of hair of the hue that will often cause a girl to be
called Carrots. Her thin, eager face was lavishly freckled; her nose was
trivial to the last extreme. Besides her hat, she carried and now
nonchalantly drew refreshment from a stick of spirally striped candy
inserted for half its length through the end of a lemon. The candy was
evidently of a porous texture, so that the juice of the fruit would
reach the consumer's pursed lips charmingly modified by its passage
along the length of the sweet. One needed but to approximate a vacuum at
the upper end of the candy, and the mighty and mysterious laws of
atmospheric pressure completed the benign process.

It should be said for the twins that they were not social climbers. In
their instant infatuation for this novel device they quite lost the
thrill that should have been theirs from the higher aspects of the
encounter. They were not impressed at meeting a Whipple on terms of
seeming equality. They had eyes and desire solely for this delectable
refection. Again and again the owner enveloped the top of the candy with
prehensile lips; deep cavities appeared in her profusely spangled
cheeks. Her eyes would close in an ecstasy of concentration. The twins
stared, and at intervals were constrained to swallow.

"Gee, gosh!" muttered the Wilbur twin, helpless in the sight of so
fierce a joy. His brother descended briskly from the fence.

"I bet that's good," he said, genially, and taking the half-filled pail
from his brother's unresisting grasp he approached the newcomer. "Try
some of these nice ripe blackberries," he royally urged.

"Thanks a lot!" said the girl, and did so. But the hospitality remained
one-sided.

"I have to keep up my strength," she explained. "I have a long, hard
journey before me. I'm running away."

Blackberry juice now stained her chin, enriching a colour scheme already
made notable by dye from the candy.

"Running away!" echoed the twins. This, also, was sane.

"Where to?" demanded Wilbur.

"Far, far off to the great city with all its pitfalls."

"New York?" demanded Merle. "What's a pitfall?"

"The way Ben Blunt did when his cruel stepmother beat him because he
wouldn't steal and bring it home."

"Ben Blunt?" questioned both twins.

"That's whom I am going to be. That's whom I am now--or just as soon as
I change clothes with some unfortunate. It's in a book. 'Ben Blunt, the
Newsboy; or, From Rags to Riches.' He run off because his cruel
stepmother beat him black and blue, and he become a mere street urchin,
though his father, Mr. Blunt, was a gentleman in good circumstances; and
while he was a mere street urchin he sold papers and blacked boots, and
he was an honest, manly lad and become adopted by a kind, rich old
gentleman named Mr. Pettigrew, that he saved from a gang of rowdies that
boded him no good, and was taken to his palatial mansion and given a
kind home and a new suit of clothes and a good Christian education, and
that's how he got from rags to riches. And I'm going to be it; I'm going
to be a mere street urchin and do everything he did."

"Ho!" The Wilbur twin was brutal. "You're nothing but a girl!"

The runaway flashed him a hostile glance.

"Don't be silly! What difference does it make? Haven't I a cruel
stepmother that is constantly making scenes if I do the least little
thing, especially since Miss Murtree went home because her mother has
typhoid in Buffalo. You wait till I get the right clothes."

"Does she beat you something awful?" demanded the Merle twin unctuously.

The victim hesitated.

"Well, you might call it that."

"What kind of right clothes?" asked his brother.

"Boy's clothes; filthy rags of boy's clothes--like yours," she
concluded. Her appraising glance rested on the garments of the
questioning twin. Both became conscious of their mean attire, and
squirmed uneasily.

"These are just everyday clothes," muttered the Wilbur twin.

"We have fine new Sunday suits at home," boasted Merle. "Too fine to
wear every day. If you saw those clothes once I guess you'd talk
different. Shoes and stockings, too."

The girl effaced his grandeur with a shrug.

"That's nothing--everyone has mere Sunday clothes."

"Is Miss Murtree that old lady that brings you to the Sunday-school?"
demanded Wilbur.

"Yes; she's my governess, and had to go to her dying mother, and I hope
she gets a cruel stepmother that will be harsh to her childish sports,
like that Mrs. Blunt was. But she isn't old. It's her beard makes her
look so mature."

"Aw!" cried both twins, denoting incredulity.

"She has, too, a beard! A little moustache and some growing on her
chin. When I first got 'Ben Blunt, or from Rags to Riches,' out of the
Sunday-school library I asked her how she made it grow, because I wanted
one to grow on me, but she made a scene and never did tell me. I wish it
would come out on me that way." She ran questing fingers along her brief
upper lip and round her pointed chin. "But prob'ly I ain't old enough."

"You're only a girl," declared the Wilbur twin, "and you won't ever have
a beard, and you couldn't be Ben Blunt."

"Only a girl!" she flashed, momentarily stung into a defense of her sex.
"Huh! I guess I'd rather be a girl than a nasty little boy with his
hands simply covered with warts."

The shamed hands of Wilbur Cowan sought the depths of his pockets, but
he came up from the blow.

"Yes, you'd rather be a girl!" he retorted, with ponderous irony. "It's
a good thing you wasn't born in China. Do you know what? If you'd been
born in China, when they seen what it was they'd simply have chucked you
into the river to drown'd."

"The idea! They would not!"

"Ho! You're so smart! I guess you think you know more than that
missionary that told us so at the meeting. I guess you think he was
telling lies. They'd have drownded you as soon as they seen it was a
girl. But boys they keep."

"I don't listen to gossip," said the girl, loftily.

"And besides," continued the inquisitor, "if you think boys are such bad
ones, what you trying to be one for, and be Ben Blunt and all like
that?"

"You're too young to understand if I told you," she replied with a
snappish dignity.

The Merle twin was regretting these asperities. His eyes clung
constantly to the lemon and candy.

"She can be Ben Blunt if she wants to," he now declared in a voice of
authority. "I bet she'll have a better moustache than that old Miss
Murphy's."

"Murtree," she corrected him, and spoke her thanks with a brightening
glance. "Here," she added, proffering her treasure, "take a good long
suck if you want to."

He did want to. His brother beheld him with anguished eyes. As Merle
demonstrated the problem in hydraulics the girl studied him more
attentively, then gleamed with a sudden new radiance.

"Oh, I'll tell you what let's do!" she exclaimed. "We'll change clothes
with each other, and then I'll be Ben Blunt without waiting till I get
to the great city. Cousin Juliana could pass me right by on the street
and never know me." She clapped her small brown hands. "Goody!" she
finished.

But the twins stiffened. The problem was not so simple.

"How do you mean--change clothes?" demanded Merle.

"Why, just change! I'll put on your clothes and look like a mere street
urchin right away."

"But what am I going to--"

"Put on my clothes, of course. I explained that."

"Be dressed like a girl?"

"Only till you get home; then you can put on your Sunday clothes."

"But they wouldn't be Sunday clothes if I had to wear 'em every day, and
then I wouldn't have any Sunday clothes."

"Stupid! You can buy new ones, can't you?"

"Well, I don't know."

"I'd give you a lot of money to buy some."

"Let's see it."

Surprisingly the girl stuck out a foot. Her ankle seemed badly swollen;
she seemed even to reveal incipient elephantiasis.

"Money!" she announced. "Busted my bank and took it all. And I put it in
my stocking the way Miss Murtree did when she went to Buffalo to visit
her dying mother. But hers was bills, and mine is nickels and dimes and
quarters and all like that--thousands of dollars' worth of 'em, and
they're kind of disagreeable. They make me limp--kind of. I'll give you
a lot of it to buy some new clothes. Let's change quick." She turned
and backed up to the Merle twin. "Unbutton my waist," she commanded.

The Merle twin backed swiftly away. This was too summary a treatment of
a situation that still needed thought.

"Let's see your money," he demanded.

"Very well!" She sat on the grassy low mound above her forebear,
released the top of the long black stocking from the bite of a hidden
garter and lowered it to the bulky burden. "Give me your cap," she said,
and into Merle's cap spurted a torrent of coins. When this had become
reduced to a trickle, and then to odd pieces that had worked down about
the heel, the cap held a splendid treasure. Both twins bent excitedly
above it. Never had either beheld so vast a sum. It was beyond
comprehension. The Wilbur twin plunged a hand thrillingly into the heap.

"Gee, gosh!" he murmured from the sheer loveliness of it. Shining
silver--thousands of dollars of it, the owner had declared.

"Now I guess you'll change," said the girl, observing the sensation she
had made.

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