Ladybird (15 page)

“No, I don’t live there,” she said, “but I can find a place, I always do!”

“Do you mean to say you’ve been hiking it like this for long?”

“Oh, not very long,” evaded Fraley, intensely worried now and anxious only to get away.

He looked at her steadily, and there was something strong and clean in his eyes that allayed her fears. Then he spoke: “Well, I may as well tell you the truth. I’d been watching you for half an hour from that upper road up there. Several times I saw you drop down as if you were all in, and you dragged along as if you couldn’t go much farther. Being somewhat lost myself, a little farther didn’t matter, so I thought I’d come down and offer you a lift. But when I saw you run and disappear into a tree, I just didn’t know what to make of it, and so I thought I’d come and see anyway. Now, ladybird, you needn’t tell me any more than you want me to know, but I certainly don’t intend to leave you in this God-forsaken spot alone at this time of night, unless you tell me you have a protector lurking somewhere in the neighborhood that will see that no harm comes to you. The people I’m staying with told me there were some tough characters not far from here, and it isn’t safe for a girl to be here alone.”

“I know,” said Fraley gently, “but this isn’t a God-forsaken place; it isn’t really. God has taken care of me in a wonderful way if you knew.”

“Well, that may be so,” said the young man. “But I guess He’s sent me to do the job this time, and I intend to do it. You can take me for a raven or an angel, whichever you like, but I’m gong to stick by till I see you in a safe place. You look too much like a stray angel yourself to be lying around loose on the desert. Now, shall we go?”

“But where are you going?” asked Fraley, wide eyed again and troubled.

“Why, we are going to find that schoolhouse. I’m going straight back to the crossroads and take the other road. If it isn’t this one, then it has to be the other one. I was more than half sure it was when I took this one, but I wanted to see where this led. I’ve never been out to this part of the country before. Come, lady, let’s mount. You ride in the saddle, and I’ll sit behind. The horse looks long enough to hold half a dozen.”

“Oh, I can easily walk beside you,” said the girl shyly.

“Walk nothing! What do you think I am, ladybird, a sheik of the desert? No, you get on. We’ll manage fine. I went to a military school once for a year, and the horses were the best thing I did there. Now, are we all set? Well, how about continuing that serial story? I want to hear about those angelic sandwiches. What was it, bread and meat in the morning?”

“Oh, the angel baked a little cake. It was another time, you know, under the juniper tree, after the big testing on Mount Carmel.”

“The testing? What was that?”

Fraley began to tell the story, and as she told it the young man marveled at her simple, pure language. How was it that a girl in these wilds, dressed as she was, could yet speak English as if she had been well educated? She must have been away to school somewhere. And yet, there was a lack of sophistication that made that seem impossible.

But there was something about that simply told story that was gripping. He stopped his wondering about the speaker and listened to the tale.

Where did she get the language in which she spoke? For Fraley, as usual, was using the words of the Book, the matchless words that cannot be improved. Occasionally she condensed in a few words of her own, but for the most part she clung pretty close to the text.

The sunset lay upon the world as she reached the end of her story.

“I say, where did you get that tale?” asked the young man as the sweet, earnest voice ceased speaking. “It’s rare, and I never heard it before.”

“Why,” said Fraley, “it’s just in the Bible. How could you miss it?”

“Well,” said the young man, studying her curiously, “you see, I’ve been rather busy with a lot of other things, and well I stopped before I got to that, I guess. But I can see now my education has been badly neglected. That’s a great tale. And you say it’s in the Bible? Do you know about what page? Perhaps you could help me find it. It might be just the thing I need tonight.”

“Tonight?” said Fraley, puzzled. “Why yes, of course I can find it. It’s in the first book of Kings, about the middle somewhere. But you don’t find things in the Bible by pages. You find them by books and chapters, you know.”

“Oh yes, of course; that was what I meant. I wonder if they will have a Bible at the schoolhouse. One would think they ought to, but you can’t always tell. You see, I haven’t brought one with me. I came away in a hurry.”

“Why, I have my Bible with me,” said Fraley, half reluctant to have a stranger handle it. “You can read out of mine.”

“The dickens, you have?” said the young man, astonishment in his voice. “Well, now that’s rare. You see, I have to hold a service tonight in that schoolhouse, and I was just figuring what to do about it. It isn’t really my job, but as I told you, I couldn’t refuse to help a fellow out when he was in such straits. He swore he wouldn’t go to the hospital unless I’d promise faithfully to get someone here in time for this service tonight, and failing in finding any of the people he suggested, I had to come myself.”

“Are you a minister?” There was a ring of interest in the girl’s voice that almost amounted to awe as she asked the question. “Then you
are
an angel! God’s ministers are called angels several times in the Bible.”

The young man gave her a startled look, and then suddenly, he discovered that he was passing the crossroads and drew the rein sharply to the left, starting down a better worn trail than the one they had been traveling.

“This is the way, I’m positive,” he said, taking a card out of his pocket and consulting a diagram traced on it with pencil. “Yes, this is where I should have turned before. But in that case I shouldn’t have seen you, and that would have been bad, wouldn’t it? I couldn’t have been even a raven then. The schoolhouse ought to be about two miles from here, and then we’ll have plenty of time to look up that story in your Bible. Now, what was that question you asked?”

Y
ou are a minister!” declared Fraley joyously. “To think that I should have found you out here in the wilderness. You see, I never saw one before, and so I did not know you. I thought a minister would look older.”

“They do come young, sometimes,” affirmed the young man, eyeing her curiously. “But where have you lived, angel lady, that you never saw one before? I fear you’re kidding me.”

“What is kidding?” She turned her large serious eyes on him, and he found it rather difficult to explain.

“I mean you are joking with me, bird lady. You surely could not have lived your years to this time without having seen many a preacher?”

“No, I haven’t really,” she said earnestly. “I lived on a mountain, and we never saw anybody except men who came now and then. They were not the kind of men ministers would come to see!”

“You don’t say!” said the young man thoughtfully and watched the pure outline of the girl’s profile as she sat before him, her head slightly turned toward him, the warm tints of the setting sun bringing out the delicacy of the features, the soft modeling of the sun-browned flesh.

“I am so glad I know you are a minister. Now I do not need to be afraid of you anymore. My mother has told me what wonderful men ministers are!”

Ah! There had been that kind of a mother! That explained some things.

“But you see, I’m not!” said the young man after a thoughtful pause. “I’m all kinds of sorry to disappoint you, but, you see, I’m only a raven after all.”

“Why but you said you were going to hold a service?” she questioned with a look as if she had learned upon something that looked strong and found it failed her.

“That’s what I’m undertaking to do. I don’t know how well I’ll make out, but I’m making the best kind of a stab at it that I know how. You see, it was this way. This fellow that was coming out here is a minister all right, I guess. I don’t really know much about him. He was a poor gink that had studied himself pretty near into the grave and hadn’t any strength left. He got up from a sickbed to go to his train so he would get here in plenty of time to get settled and begin on this service tonight. He’s a stranger to me. I only saw him about half an hour before I had to leave. You see, he was taken awfully sick in the street and was almost knocked down. In fact, he fell as he was crossing the street toward the station, and we picked him up unconscious. I happened to be driving my car that way and was the first one to pick him up, and of course I landed him at the hospital and thought that would be the end of it. But on the way there the poor fellow came to and insisted that I take him to the train instead of the hospital, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer till I promised I’d see somebody took his place out here. Of course there was nothing to do but promise; but when I got him to the hospital and the doctor got on the job he found there had to be an operation, and the poor guy was so upset that I just stuck around a few minutes. He seemed to cling to me like a drowning passenger to a lifeboat, and boy! I couldn’t shake him. He said he had three friends, any one of which could take this job, and I promised to see that one of them went by the next train and stuck on the job till he got there. So he went happy to the operating room, and I went to hunt my man and get him shipped out here.”

Fraley’s vivid little face was turned to listen, and he paused to wonder again at the delicacy and refinement of it. It was like finding a rare exotic flower in a wilderness.

“Well?” she said breathlessly.

“Well, would you believe it, I couldn’t get one of these guys to come. The first one had got married and gone on his wedding trip; the second one was off in Maine being headmaster of a boys’ camp, an all-summer job; and the third had gone down to Jersey to take charge of a church. There I was, and by the time I got the last man chased to his hiding place, it was just about time to leave. There wasn’t a soul I know would come out here even for a week till I got time to hunt somebody else. I called up several men I knew that do this sort of thing, but they were all busy for the summer. I tried to sleep over it, but I couldn’t get asleep. So I got up and took the midnight train. I couldn’t get away from that guy’s face when he made me promise to come, and here I am. I had to keep my promise, didn’t I?”

“Of course,” said Fraley. “But how are you going to do it? Doesn’t a man have to know how? And doesn’t he have to be set apart, or or blessed or something the way they did with the Levites before they could minister before the Lord? You might make some mistake!”

“Blessed if I know. I’m doing my best, aren’t I? Angels could do no more,” the glib tongue replied.

The girl looked serious and troubled. “I should think you’d be afraid. You know, God sent down fire from heaven on Nadab and Abihu for doing something like that.”

“The dickens, He did? What did they do?”

“They offered strange fire. I don’t know just what that means, but it was something they hadn’t been told to do. Something they were not supposed to do.”

“How did you know all that?” he asked wonderingly.

“Why, it’s all in the Bible,” she said simply, as if that settled it.

“Say,” he said wonderingly, “you know a lot, don’t you? I wish I knew some of those things. I never realized there were things like that in a Bible!”

“Why, it’s easy. You could begin now. You learn a few verses every day,” she said, as if that were the most natural thing in the world.

“You don’t say!” he responded, studying her earnest young face and wondering how a soul like this had come to be on the bad old earth.

But now, with a little turn of the road around the side of a hill, they came suddenly upon the log schoolhouse.

It was still light, and the young man alighted and turned to help the girl but found she had sprung to the ground before he could get to her.

She sat down on the step and began to open her bag at once while he tethered his horse, and when he came back to her, she handed him the Bible in its cotton binding.

He took it curiously and marked the worn condition of its pages. Truly this old book had seen hard usage. He gazed at it reverently. The Book of God. Some inkling of what the Book had been meant to be to the human heart was revealed to him as he looked at the worn pages and then at the face of the lovely girl who had been fed upon it.

“Well now, where is that man Elijah?” he asked gravely. “I’ve been thinking. Don’t you think it would be all right if I just read that story to the folks? That ought to be something anybody could do—to read a story.”

She pointed out the place where it began and ended, and he sat down on the step of the schoolhouse and began to read in the dying light. And when the light failed, he took out a pocket flashlight he was carrying and turned it on the page.

Fraley dropped down in the grass and leaned against a tree, watching him as he read and wondering what her mother would think if she knew she was here alone with a strange young man.

The young man was still reading when the first member of the congregation arrived. He swung himself from his saddle—a long, lank man with a discouraged droop to his shoulders and a kindly look in his eyes. And behind him on two mules rode his bright-eyed wife and their two boys.

The man said “howdy” and unlocked the schoolhouse door. Presently, light streamed forth from the door—from a swinging kerosene lamp and from four candles in different parts of the dim interior of the building.

The young missionary with his finger between the leaves of the old Bible rose and went inside, and Fraley stole into a shadowed corner, slipping into a seat and looking around her in wonder.

So this was a schoolhouse! All these desks for the scholars—two to a desk. And that smooth dark surface running around the front and sides of the room must be a blackboard. She had heard her mother describe it all.

People began to drop into the schoolhouse now by ones and twos. The tall, thin first-comer rang an old cracked bell, and the echo of its reverberations seemed to come back in relays from the mountains round about. Fraley sat in her corner and listened with awe. No visitor in a great cathedral could have felt more thrill than she as she listened for the first time to the call to worship as it rang out in that primitive countryside.