Day after day through the long summer, Jesse Bentley drove from farm to farm up and down the valley of Wine Creek, and his grandson went with him.  They rode in a comfortable old phaeton drawn by the white horse.  The old man scratched his thin white beard and talked to himself of his plans for increasing the productiveness of the fields they visited and of God’s part in the plans all men made.  Sometimes he looked at David and smiled happily and then for a long time he appeared to forget the boy’s existence.  More and more every day now his mind turned back again to the dreams that had filled his mind when he had first come out of the city to live on the land.  One afternoon he startled David by letting his dreams take entire possession of him.  With the boy as a witness, he went through a ceremony and brought about an accident that nearly destroyed the companionship that was growing up between them.

Jesse and his grandson were driving in a distant part of the valley some miles from home.  A forest came down to the road and through the forest Wine Creek wriggled its way over stones toward a distant river.  All the afternoon Jesse had been in a meditative mood and now he began to talk.  His mind went back to the night when he had been frightened by thoughts of a giant that might come to rob and plunder him of his possessions, and again as on that night when he had run through the fields crying for a son, he became excited to the edge of insanity.  Stopping the horse he got out of the buggy and asked David to get out also.  The two climbed over a fence and walked along the bank of the stream.  The boy paid no attention to the muttering of his grandfather, but ran along beside him and wondered what was going to happen.  When a rabbit jumped up and ran away through the woods, he clapped his hands and danced with delight.  He looked at the tall trees and was sorry that he was not a little animal to climb high in the air without being frightened.  Stooping, he picked up a small stone and threw it over the head of his grandfather into a clump of bushes.  “Wake up, little animal.  Go and climb to the top of the trees,” he shouted in a shrill voice.

Jesse Bentley went along under the trees with his head bowed and with his mind in a ferment.  His earnestness affected the boy, who presently became silent and a little alarmed.  Into the old man’s mind had come the notion that now he could bring from God a word or a sign out of the sky, that the presence of the boy and man on their knees in some lonely spot in the forest would make the miracle he had been waiting for almost inevitable.  “It was in just such a place as this that other David tended the sheep when his father came and told him to go down unto Saul,” he muttered.

Taking the boy rather roughly by the shoulder, he climbed over a fallen log and when he had come to an open place among the trees he dropped upon his knees and began to pray in a loud voice.