The other Half

The other Half by Edwin L. Sabin

"The Other Half" is a short story narrated by a barnstorming aviator who, in 1920, advertises for a paying passenger on a transcontinental flight from Omaha to San Francisco. The first applicant is an intense, secretive man past seventy who calls himself John Brown, insists he is in perfect health, demands to travel by air rather than train or car, and reveals an odd obsession: he asks nearly everyone he meets whether they have ever seen the mate to a pierced half-dollar he carries, engraved with the truncated words "God Be With You—". He is emphatically a woman-hater, forbids any female passenger aboard, and has no discernible business reason for his constant cross-country trips; a banker who knows him describes him as a restless "Wandering Jew" who returns from every journey only to set out again, always searching and never satisfied. The narrator accepts him as a passenger, and the two depart. Engine trouble and a jammed rudder force an emergency landing on an isolated, wind-scoured mesa in the Wyoming badlands. While the narrator inspects the aircraft, Brown stumbles on a bleached human skeleton — and clutched in its finger bones, the matching half of his silver coin, dated 1866 and inscribed "Till We Meet Again." The two halves fit together to complete the sentimental keepsake phrase. Confronted with the discovery, Brown breaks down and reveals his history. In 1867, as a young government clerk posted to Fort Bridger, he had arranged for his wife, Catherine ("Kitty"), to follow him west with a wagon train. He received word that she had run off with a train employee, a half-Spanish, half-Indian man named Pierre Lavelle, abandoning him with only a cruel farewell note. Believing himself betrayed, Brown spent more than fifty years wandering the West's old boomtowns and rendezvous points — Denver, Cheyenne, Salt Lake, Leadville, Deadwood, Dodge City — nursing his bitterness toward women and obsessively hunting for any trace of the coin or of Kitty, unable to stop searching even in old age. The narrator then reveals that he can supply "the other half" of the story to match the other half of the coin. He recounts, with uncanny precision, what actually happened on that trail: Lavelle had lured Kitty away under false pretenses, tied her to her saddle, and forged the note abandoning her husband. When he finally attempted to assault her, she fought him off with his own knife, fled to the top of the mesa, and, trapped at its edge, prayed for deliverance. A violent, roaring cloudburst swept in; she raised her arms to it as if to a divine chariot. Lavelle, frightened, fired his rifle at her before fleeing as the storm struck. The cloudburst then washed out the approaches to the mesa, sealing it into an inaccessible, sheer-walled island, so Lavelle could never confirm her fate or retrieve any trace of her; he abandoned the search, changed his name, drifted into Arizona, and was eventually killed in a saloon shooting in Tombstone decades earlier. Kitty's body has lain undisturbed on the mesa top ever since, the coin still in her grasp — faithful to her husband and innocent of the betrayal he believed in for fifty years. Brown, incredulous, demands to know how the narrator can possibly know all this in such detail. The narrator answers that the proof lies in the very coincidences that have delivered it: the bones and coin happening to lie on this mesa, Brown happening to be his passenger, their plane happening to fail and land at this exact spot — and that his own middle name is Lavelle, inherited from a grandfather whose private memoirs confessed the "great wrong" done to Kitty. The story closes with the old man collapsing to his knees, pressing the reunited coin to his lips and speaking his long-lost wife's name, while the narrator withdraws to leave him with the truth he had chased across the West for half a century. Thematically, the story turns on dramatic irony and providential coincidence: a lifetime of misogynistic bitterness built on a lie is dissolved in a single accidental landing, and the coin's inscription — "God Be With You Till We Meet Again" — is literalized as the vehicle of posthumous vindication and reunion.

By Edwin L. Sabin · First published 1926 · Genre: Mystery, Historical Fiction, Romance · 4,663 words

First lines

I had advertised that a passenger would be taken (for a price) on my return trip by air from Omaha to the coast, and awaited the responses with no little curiosity. A flying companion should be chosen carefully.

The very first applicant, therefore, startled me. He appeared almost as soon as the papers were off the presses -- a spare, intense, elderly man, with gray mustache and imperial, and bushy brows shadowing singularly bright, restless eyes. His years, of course, were against him; his weathered, lean face and active step bespoke energy, nevertheless I judged him to be rising sixty.

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The other Half is listed on Textopian as a short story by Edwin L. Sabin, dated 1926 CE.

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short story · weird fiction · speculative fiction · aviation · early 20th century · American West · mystery · suspense · historical fiction · emotional · loss · longing

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