All of J.W.’s questions were really one big question:  “Say, Marty, boy, I always knew you had something in you that didn’t show on the surface, but I never thought it was exactly the stuff they need to make up-to-date country preachers.  How does it happen that you’ve blossomed out in these few months as a Moses to lead a ’rural parish’—­if that’s the right scientific name—­out of such a wilderness as I saw at Deep Creek last Sunday?”

Marty made a pass at his chum in the fashion of the Cartwright days, and waited for the return punch before answering.  “Don’t you ‘Moses’ me, John Wesley.  Besides, this circuit was no wilderness.  Henderson, the preacher who was here before me, was just the man for this work.  He knew the country, and believed it had the makings of even more attractive life than the town.  Too bad he had to quit.  But he started these folks thinking the right way.  And then, don’t you remember I wrote last summer that I was spending two weeks at a school for rural ministers?”

“Oh, yes, I remember that,” J.W. answered, “but that’s no explanation.  I spent four years at a college for town and country boys, and now look at me!  Two weeks is a little too short a course to produce miracles, even with such an intellect as yours, notwithstanding your name is bigger than mine, Martin Luther!  Now, if you’d said four weeks, I might almost have believed you, but two weeks—­well, it just isn’t done, that’s all!”

“Make fun of it, will you!” said Marty, with another short-arm jab.  “Now, listen to me.  That thing is simple enough.  First off, I’d been thinking four years about being a preacher.  On top of that, I’d been a country boy for twenty-three years.  I know the Deep Creek neighborhood better than you do, because I had to live there.  You were just visiting the farm your father paid taxes on.  When I came here I found that Henderson had set things going.  He told me what his dream was.  So, when I went to that two-weeks’ school I was ready to take in every word and see every picture and get a grip on every principle.  Maybe you don’t know that it was one of many such schools set up by the rural work leaders of our Home Missions Board, and it was a great school.  They had no use for rocking-chair ruralists, so the faculty, instead of being made up of paper experts, was a bunch of men who knew.  It was worth a year of dawdling over text-books.  You see, I knew I could come back here and try everything on my own people.  It was like the Squeers school in ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ ’Member?  When the spelling class was up, Squeers says to Smike, the big, helpless dunce, ‘Spell window,’” And Smike says, ‘W-i-n-d-e-r,’ ‘All right,’ Squeers says, ’now go out and wash ’em,’ Well, I hope I got the spelling a little nearer right, but I came home and began washing my windows.  That’s all.

J.W. said “Huh!” and that stood for understanding, and approval, and confidence.

As to Marty’s preaching, it was a boy’s preaching, naturally, but it was preaching.  And the people came for it; J.W., remarked to himself the contrast between the close-parked cars around Ellis church and the forlornly vacant horse-sheds he had seen at Deep Creek the Sunday before.