"Like to hear about him?" Miss Pinkerton asked.
The boy dropped down on the running board with his bandaged leg stretched out before him. Other children came running. Sitting on the running board, too, Miss Pinkerton told them about Jesus, how he used his life to help other people be kinder to each other. The camp children listened with mouths open, and brushed the rough hair from their eyes to see the pictures she took from the car. The boy's mother stood with her arms wrapped in her dirty apron and listened, too.
But it was the boy who sat breathless till the story was done. Then he scrubbed a ragged sleeve across eyes and nose and spoke in a choked, angry voice. "I wish I'd been there. I bet them guys wouldn't-wouldn't got so fresh with--with him. But listen, Lady!" His dark eyes were fiercely questioning. "Why ain't nobody told us? It sure seems like we ought to been told before."
All the way home Jimmie sat silent. As the car stopped, he got his voice. "Miss Pink'ton, did he mean, honest, he didn't know about God and Jesus?"
Miss Pinkerton nodded. "He--he didn't know he had a Heavenly Father."
"And no Gramma either," Jimmie mumbled. "Gee."
[ THE HOPYARDS]
Through February, March, and part of April, the Beecham family picked peas in the Imperial Valley.
"Peas!" Rose-Ellen exploded the word on their last night in the "jungle" camp. "I don't believe there are enough folks in the world to cat all the peas we've picked."