Joseph, the shepherd, son of Thomas of Pella, moved out of the green
marsh before sunset, as he had planned to do, but not for the original
motive. The sheep, indeed, would not have flourished in that dampness,
rich as it was in young grass, but, more than that, there was no
shelter for the wounded man who lay by the roadside.
The shepherd, who knew the hills of Judea as far as the Plain of
Esdraelon as well as he knew the stony streets of the Christian city,
located the nearest roof as one which a fagot-maker had occupied two
years before. It was some distance up in the hills to the west. Since
the scourge of war had passed over Palestine, there were scores of
such hovels, vacant and abandoned to the bats and the small wild life
about the countryside, and the boy doubted seriously if the thatch
that covered it were still whole. But he attracted the attention of a
pair of robust young Galileans on the way to the Passover, and, by
their help, carried the wounded man to shelter in this hut. Urge, the
sheep-dog, rushed the sheep out of the sedge and hurried them after
his master, and in an hour Joseph was once more settled, his sheep
were once more nosing over the rocky slants of a hill, his dog once
more flat on his belly, watching. But it was a different day, after
all.
The hut of the fagot-maker was the four walls and a roof and the earth
that floored it, but it was wealth because it was shelter. It had two
doors which were merely openings in the sides and between them lay the
man on sheep-pelts with a cotton abas, which one of the Galileans had
left, over him. At one of these doors, sitting sidewise, so that he
could watch in or out, sat Joseph.
All night the man on the sheepskins spoke to the blackened thatch
above him of the siege of Jerusalem and the treachery of Julian of
Ephesus. He read letters from Costobarus and instructed Aquila over
and over again. Then he tossed a coin and spent hours counting the
hairs in the long locks that fell from the shining head of the moon
down upon his breast, at midnight.
At times the boy, with the exquisite beauty of sleep on his heavy
lids, would creep over from his vigil at the door and lay his cool
hand on the sick man's forehead. And the sick man would speak in a low
controlled voice, saying: "Naaman being a leper, my friend, why was not the law fulfilled
against him?"
But the soothing influence of that touch did not endure. Again, he
took census of the fighting-men of Judea, by the Roman statistics
which he had from the decurion, and searched through his tunic for his
wallet to write down the result. Failing to find it, he raised himself
to shout for Julian to return his property.