minister who had married Esau and Amity, but in the Fall Creek church with the spring sun brightening the dust on the flagstones, and Hostetter to stand up with Len and Joan’s father to give the bride away. There was a party afterward. Esau shook Len’s hand and Amity gave Joan a kiss and a spiteful look, and the old man got out the jug and passed it around and told Len, “Boy, you’ve got the finest girl in the world. You treat her right, or I’ll have to take her back again.” He laughed and thumped Len on the back until his spine ached, and then a little bit after Hostetter found him alone on the back stoop, getting a breath of air.
He didn’t say anything for a time, except that it looked like an early spring. Then he said, “I’m going to miss you, Len. But I’m glad. This was the right thing to do.”
“I know it was.”
“Well, sure. But I didn’t mean that. I mean that you’re really settled here now, really a part of it. I’m glad. Sherman’s glad. We all are.”
Then Len knew it had been the right thing to do, just like Joan said. But he could not quite look Hostetter in the face.
“Sherman wasn’t sure of you,” said Hostetter. “I wasn’t either, for a while. I’m glad you’ve made peace with your conscience. I know better than any of them what a tough thing it must have been to do.” He held out his hand. “Good luck.”
Len took his hand and said, “Thanks.” He smiled. But he thought, I am deceiving him just as I deceived Pa, and I don’t want to, any more than I did then. But that was wrong, and this is right, this I have to do—
He was glad that he would not have to face Hostetter any more.
The new house was strange. It was little and old, on the edge of Fall Creek, swept and scrubbed and filled with woman-things provided by Joan’s mother and her well-wishing friends, curtains and quilts and tablecloths and bits of rag carpeting. So much work and good will, all for the use of a few days. He had been given two weeks for his honeymoon. And now they were all ready. Now they could cling together and wait together with no one to watch them, with all suspicion set at rest and the path clear before them.
“Pray for Ishmaelites,” she told him. “They always come as soon as the pass is open, begging. Pray they come now.”
“They’ll come,” said Len. There was a calmness on him, a conviction that he would be delivered even as the children of Israel were delivered out of Egypt.
The Ishmaelites came. Whether they were the same ones that had come last fall or another band he did not know, but they were gaunter and more starved-looking, more ragged and suffering than he would have believed people could be and live. They begged powder and shot, and Sherman threw in a keg of salt beef, for the sake of the children. They took it. Joan watched them start their slow staggering march back up to the pass before evening, with her hand clasped tight in Len’s, and she whispered, “Pray for a dark night.”
“It’s already answered,” he said, looking at the sky. “We’ll have rain. Maybe snow, if it keeps getting colder.”
“Anything, just so it’s dark.”
And now the house fulfilled its purpose, giving up the things it had hidden for them safely, the food, the water bags, the blanket packs, the two coarse sheets rubbed with ashes and artfully torn. Len wrote some painful words to Hostetter. “I won’t ever tell about Bartorstown, I owe you that. I am sorry. Forgive me, but I got to go back.” He left the paper on the table in the front room. They blew out the candles early, knowing they would not be disturbed.
But now Joan’s courage failed her and she sat shivering on the edge of the bed, thinking what would happen if they were seen and caught.
“Nobody’ll see us,” Len said. “Nobody.”
He believed that. He was not afraid. It was as though some secret word had been given him that he was beyond harm until he got back to Piper’s Run.
“We better go now, Len.”
“Wait. They’re weak and carrying the young ones. We can catch them easy. Wait till we’re sure.”
Dark, full night, and a drifting rain. Len’s muscles drew tight and his heart pounded. Now it is time, he thought. Now I take her hand and we go.
The road to the pass is steep and winding. There is no one behind us. The rain pours down, and now it is sleet. Now the sleet has turned to snow. The Lord has stretched out his garment to hide us. Hurry. Hurry to the pass, over the steep road and the freezing mud.
“Len, I’ve got to rest.”
“Not yet. Give me your hand again. Now—”
Into the black gut of the pass, with the snow falling and the winter’s drifts still piled high where the sun can’t reach. Now we can rest a minute, only a minute.
“Len, this looks like it might be a spring blizzard. It could close the pass again before morning.”
“Good. Then they can’t follow us.”
“But we’ll freeze to death. Hadn’t we better turn back?”
“Haven’t you any faith? Can’t you see this is being done for us? Come on!”
On and up, across the saddleback and down the other side, going fast, much faster than the slow mule teams with the loaded wagons. Past the camping place, and onto the rocky slope beyond. There is a sound of singing on the wind.
“There. You hear that? Where’s those sheets?”
I will put on the garment of repentance. The Ishmaelites have no wagons. They have no cattle to break their legs among the stones. They march all night, away from the haunts of iniquity and back to the clean desert where they do their lifelong penance for the sins of man. I have a penance too. I will do it when it is sent upon me.
Close now, but not too close, in the night and the falling snow. They sing and moan as they go along, into the lower pass, all straggled out in a ragged line. If they look back they will only see two Ishmaelites, two of their own band.
They do not look back. Their eyes are on God.
Down through the winding cut in the rock, and back there in Bartorstown in the monitor room someone is sitting. Not Jones, this isn’t his time, but someone. Someone watching the little lights blinking on the board. Someone thinking, There go the crazy Ishmaelites back to the desert. Someone yawning, and lighting a pipe, waiting for Jones to come so he can go home.
Someone with a button close under his fingers, ready to use.
He does not use it.
It is dawn. The Ishmaelites have disappeared in the wind and the blowing snow.
Joan. Joan, get up. Joan look, we’re out of the pass.
We’re free.
Praise the Lord, who has delivered us from Bartorstown.
29
It was a spring blizzard. They survived it, crouched in a hole of the rock like two wild things sheltering together for warmth. It stopped the high pass and covered their tracks, and afterward they fled south along the broken line of the foothills, watchful, furtive, ready to hide at the slightest sign of human life other than their own.
“They’ll hunt for us.”
“I left a letter. I swore—”
“They’ll hunt for us. You know that.”
“I reckon they’d have to. Yes.”
He remembered the radios, and how the Bartorstown men had kept track of two runaway boys, a long time ago.
“We’ll have to be careful, Len. Awfully careful.”
