brought us together and made us two--the nervous olive-skinned
Hispano-American of the tropics and the phlegmatic blue-eyed
Saxon of the cold north--one in spirit and more than brothers.
Many were the daylight hours we spent together and "tired the sun
with talking"; many, past counting, the precious evenings in that
restful house of his where I was an almost daily guest. I had
not looked for such happiness; nor, he often said, had he. A
result of this intimacy was that the vague idea concerning his
hidden past, that some unusual experience had profoundly affected
him and perhaps changed the whole course of his life, did not
diminish, but, on the contrary, became accentuated, and was often
in my mind. The change in him was almost painful to witness
whenever our wandering talk touched on the subject of the
aborigines, and of the knowledge he had acquired of their
character and languages when living or travelling among them; all
that made his conversation most engaging--the lively, curious
mind, the wit, the gaiety of spirit tinged with a tender
melancholy--appeared to fade out of it; even the expression of
his face would change, becoming hard and set, and he would deal
you out facts in a dry mechanical way as if reading them in a
book. It grieved me to note this, but I dropped no hint of such
a feeling, and would never have spoken about it but for a quarrel
which came at last to make the one brief solitary break in that
close friendship of years. I got into a bad state of health, and
Abel was not only much concerned about it, but annoyed, as if I
had not treated him well by being ill, and he would even say that
I could get well if I wished to. I did not take this seriously,
but one morning, when calling to see me at the office, he
attacked me in a way that made me downright angry with him. He
told me that indolence and the use of stimulants was the cause of