“Ha, ha; these pilgrims are a mad-lot, with piebald customs!”
“What news, runner?”
“What news! A plague in Bozrah! De Griffin’s twins are nigh to death—De Griffin? May be thou knowest him? Thou dost look like him: but he’s dead. Now his twins have no nurses nor mourners, but Rizpah, and I’m racing to Gerash to see if I can find a soul to swell her wailings.”
The rider turned his horse and with a word, “Selamet,”—“peace,” was gone.
Miriamne had heard enough, and now, with redoubled vehemence, reöpened her arguments and appeals to her father to go to her home.
“I’ll not go into Rizpah’s house. I tell thee thou art inviting me into hell!”
Miriamne, in turn, replied: “There is good anywhere for those that earnestly seek it. Mohammed, they say, got his first inspiration in Bozrah, and he a Moslem, a crescent devotee!”
“Yes; he wed a rich wife there, too, and she was a saint. I may envy him in these things.”
The young woman hastily entered the city and stopped for a little time at the mission house of Father Adolphus, briefly, hurriedly, to announce her return, inquire the latest report concerning the illness of her brothers, and to beseech the old priest to go out after her father; if possible, to bring him into the city and to the desolate fireside.
“Well, well; there, now, I’d call thee bee or humming-bird, truly, darting from point to point, subject to subject, if I didn’t know I was talking to an angel.”