Barclay blinked a second and replied, "Well, now, General, look here—what I don't understand is how you expect to accomplish anything without money."
"I can't tell you, John—but some way I have faith that I can—can do more real work in this world without bothering to get money, than I can by stopping to get money with which to do good."
"But if you had a million, you could do more good with it than you are doing now, couldn't you?" asked Barclay.
"Yes, perhaps I could," admitted the general, as he eyed his miserable little pile of worldly goods in the basket. "I suppose I could," he repeated meditatively.
"All right then, General," cut in Barclay. "I have no million, any more than you have; but I'm going to get one—or two, maybe a dozen if I can, and I want to do good with it just as much as you do. When I get it I'll show you." Barclay rose to lend the general a hand with his basket. As they went awkwardly through the door with the load, the general stopping to get a hold on the basket that would not twist his hand, he put the load down in the hall and said: "But while you're getting that million, you're wasting God's ten talents, boy. Can't you see that if you would use your force, your keenness, and persistence helping mankind in some way—teaching, preaching, lending a hand to the poor, or helping to fight organized greed, you would get more of God's work done than you will by squeezing the daylights out of your fellow-men, making them hate money because of your avarice, and end by doling it out to them in charity? That's my point, boy. That's why I don't want your railroad job."
They had dropped the basket in the bare room. The general had not so much as a chair or a desk. He looked it over, and Barclay's eyes followed his. "What are you going to do for furniture?" asked the younger man.
The general's thin face wrinkled into a smile. "Well," he replied, "I suppose that if a raven can carry dry-goods, groceries, boots and shoes and drugs, paints and oils,—and certainly the ravens have been bringing those things to the Wards for eight years now, and they're all paid for,—the blessed bird can hump itself a little and bring some furniture, stoves, and hardware."
Barclay limped into his room, while the general rubbed the dust off the windows. In a minute John came stumbling in with a chair, and as he set it down he said, "Here comes the first raven, General, and now if you'll kindly come and give the ravens a lift, they'll bring you a table." And so the two men dragged the table into the office, and as they finished, Ward saw General Hendricks coming up the stairs, and when the new room had been put in order,—a simple operation,—General Ward hurried home to help Mrs. Ward get in their dahlia roots for the winter.
As they were digging in the garden, covering the ferns and wrapping the magnolia tree they had lately acquired, and mulching the perennials, Mrs. Mary Barclay came toward them buffeting the wind. She wore the long cowlish waterproof cloak and hood of the period—which she had put on during the cloudy morning. Her tall strong figure did not bend in the wind, and the schoolbooks she carried in her hand broke the straight line of her figure only to heighten the priestess effect that her approaching presence produced.
"Well, children," she said, as she stood by the Wards at their work, "preparing your miracles?" She looked at the bulbs and roots, and smiled. "How wonderful that all the beauty of the flowers should be in those scrawny brown things; and," she added as she brushed away the brown hair of her forties from her broad brow, "God probably thinks the same thing when He considers men and their souls."