evil
and how Miss Cushman's courage faced it.]

CHAPTER XXVII

ON THE DESERT CAMEL TRAIL

_Archibald Forder_

(Time of Incident 1900-1901)

_The Boy Who Listened_

An eight-year-old schoolboy sat one evening in a crowded meeting in
Salisbury, his eyes wide open with wonder as he heard a bronzed and
bearded man on the platform telling of his adventures in Africa. The
man was Robert Moffat.

It was a hot summer night in August (1874). The walls of the building
where the meeting was held seemed to have disappeared and the boy
Archibald Forder could in imagination see "the plain of a thousand
villages," that Livingstone had seen when this same Robert Moffat had
called him to Africa many years before. As the boy Archibald heard
Moffat he too wished to go out into the foreign field. Many things
happened as he grew up; but he never forgot that evening.

At the age of thirteen he left home and was apprenticed to the grocery
and baking business. In 1888 he married. At this time he read in a
magazine about missionary work in Kerak beyond the River Jordan--in
Moab among the Arabs--where a young married man ready to rough it was
needed. He sailed with his wife for Kerak on September 3, 1891, and
left Jerusalem by camel on September 30, on the four days' journey
across Jordan to Kerak. Three times they were robbed by brigands on
this journey. Mr. Forder worked there till 1896. He then left
and travelled through America to secure support for an attempt to
penetrate Central Arabia with the first effort to carry the Gospel of
Jesus Christ there.

The story that follows tells how Forder made his pioneer journey into
the Arabian desert.

_The Adventure into the Desert_

Two pack-horses were stamping their hoofs impatiently outside a house
in Jerusalem in the early morning a week or two before Christmas.[65]
Inside the house a man was saying good-bye to his wife and his three
children. He was dressed as an Arab, with a long scarf wrapped about
his head and on the top the black rope of twisted goats' hair that the
Arab puts on when he becomes a man.

"Will you be long, Father?" asked his little four-year-old boy.

The father could not answer, for he was going out from Jerusalem for
hundreds of miles into the sun and the thirst of the desert, to the
land of the fiercest Arabs--Moslems whose religion tells them that
they must kill the infidel Christians. It was difficult to tear
himself from his wife and his chi