“Come out and show your faces, you dogs!” chanted the mass of people outside the door. The yelling kept up for over an hour, until Jonathan decided that if they did not go out, it would be only a matter of time before the crowd came in to get them.
“If we open the door, perhaps it will give one of the cart owners a chance to leave by the back way with a message for the town official pleading for him to give us safe passage through his town,” said Dr. Leslie.
Everyone agreed this was a good plan, and so one of the cart owners was chosen to slip out the back door while the missionaries unbolted the front door and confronted the crowd. One by one the missionaries stepped outside and inched along the veranda with their backs to the wall. A fresh volley of insults rose from the crowd, but no one moved to attack. Jonathan and his family, along with the others, stood shoulder to shoulder facing the crowd until nightfall. It was a strange experience. It seemed that everyone wanted them dead, but no one wanted to take the first step towards killing them. Once darkness had fallen, the crowd drifted away, and the missionaries were able to go back inside. Jonathan flopped down on the k’ang; standing for such a long time had tested his physical endurance to the limit.
About an hour later, the cart owner knocked quietly on the back door and was let inside. As he sat down on the floor, every eye was fixed on him.
“Well, what happened? Will the official help us?” asked Mrs. McKenzie.
The messenger looked discouraged. “The news is not good,” he replied, shaking his head. “I was not allowed to see the official myself, though the guards did take your message to him. While I was standing in the courtyard waiting for a reply, I heard two soldiers discussing the situation.”
The cart owner glanced nervously at the children. Jonathan wished he could tell them to go and play while the adults talked, but they were all stuck in a single room together, and so they would just have to hear whatever came next.
“I overheard one soldier telling another that when the official read the message he immediately ordered a group of soldiers to march to a spot on the road leading west.” The cart owner’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Early in the morning when we pass by there, they are ordered to kill us all and make it look like a band of robbers did it.”
“But how do they know we will go that way and what time we will resume our journey?” asked Rosalind.
“Ha!” said the cart owner. “The official is a clever man. He is sending some soldiers to ‘protect’ us. That way they will guide us right to the ambush.”
There was stunned silence as everyone tried to understand the situation they now found themselves in. There was no getting around it. They would never be allowed to leave the city unless they did so under the protection of the official’s soldiers, but in accepting his protection they would be guided to their deaths.
No one seemed sure of what to do, except the cart owner. “I am leaving now,” he said. “I don’t care what happens to my cart. You foreigners will all be dead before the morning, and I do not want to die with you. When I get back to Changte, I will tell your friends of your fate.” With that he said a quick good-bye and was gone.
“What other choices do we have?” asked Dr. Leslie.
“None,” replied Jonathan. “We must go on and trust ourselves to God’s care.”
No one was surprised when in the early hours of the morning a band of soldiers arrived at the inn. “We have come to guide you safely out of our city,” one of them announced. “Quickly, we must go while it is still dark. Hitch the carts!”
Jonathan and Dr. Leslie were helped aboard the first cart, and the owner was urged to go as fast as possible by the soldiers, who appeared eager to finish their task.
The carts clattered along the ancient road and through the town gate. It was then that Mrs. McKenzie came running up to the front cart. “Mr. Griffith, is he with you?” she asked breathlessly.
Jonathan sat up and looked around. He heard Rosalind reply, “No, I thought he was in the cart with you and your husband and Paul.”
Jonathan could hear the panic rising in Mrs. McKenzie’s voice. “Paul? I haven’t seen Paul since we were in the inn.”
“Oh no!” exclaimed Rosalind. “You mean neither of them is with us?”
“I want to go back,” wailed Ruth, who sat beside her mother. “I don’t like the dark.”
“Hush now,” replied Rosalind. “We have to find Paul and Mr. Griffith.”
The carts were soon stopped, and the Chinese members of the group offered to look for the missing pair while the foreigners stayed under the protection of the guards. Jonathan lay in the bottom of the cart praying for his nine-year-old son. He hoped Paul was still alive and that he was with Mr. Griffith, but none of them had any way of knowing.
As darkness began giving way to dawn, there was still no word of the whereabouts of the two missing foreigners. Eventually, the unsaid question on everyone’s mind had to be asked aloud. Should they go on without the two missing members of their party? It was an agonizing decision for a parent to make, to leave a boy somewhere in a hostile city so as to try to get the others to safety. But no matter how difficult, a decision had to be made.
“We must go on,” Jonathan finally whispered to Rosalind, being careful not to wake the soldiers who had crawled into the cart and were asleep alongside him. “Tell the owner of the last cart to stay behind. That’s all we can do. We have to keep going.”
With heavy hearts the missionaries moved on. As they did so, all the soldiers remained asleep in the carts, leaving the cart owners with little idea of which direction to take. As the sun came up, they came to a fork in the road. By this time, the cart owners themselves were nodding off to sleep, and the oxen were left to take whichever path they pleased. The first pair turned right, and the second cart followed.
About an hour later, when the sun began to warm them all, one of the soldiers woke up. “Where are we?” he demanded, rubbing his eyes.
“We don’t know,” replied one of the cart owners honestly, “but we have been traveling a while now.”
The soldier studied the landscape and then let out a yell of protest. “It’s the wrong way!”
Within seconds he had kicked the other soldiers awake, and they were all arguing over whose fault it was that they had fallen asleep.
“They went the wrong way,” groaned the leader of the group, his face drained of color.
“We cannot go back!” gasped another soldier. “We have disobeyed orders.”
“What will happen to us now?” whispered a third man, his eyes wide with terror.
Jonathan lay in the cart smiling to himself. Obviously, from the way they were blaming one another, the oxen had not taken the path on which the ambush had been set up.
After several more minutes of arguing, along with some punches and kicks at one another, the soldiers climbed from the carts and began walking back to town. Once they were gone, the group had only the lone rider left by the party of engineers to protect them. As the morning wore on, the carts were stopped about a dozen times by angry mobs who wanted to rob the foreigners. However, since everything had already been stolen, the travelers were allowed to continue on unharmed.
About midday a gang of bandits leapt out from behind a craggy outcrop of rocks. They swarmed around the carts, and one of them poked a long spear at the chest of one of the cart owners.
By now Jonathan was too weak to sit up, but several of the bandits jumped up onto the cart and peered down at him. “Up here,” one of the men yelled to their leader.
Another man quickly jumped up onto the cart. He had long matted hair and a wild look in his eyes. Jonathan spoke calmly to him, and the man, who appeared to be the leader, stopped his cursing and threats.
Rosalind took advantage of the moment’s silence. “Look,” she said quietly, following her husband’s example. “We have come a long way. The men are wounded, and the children are very frightened.” She then grabbed some of the filthy rags the Muslim villagers had given her and continued talking. “Yet we have met kindness along the way, and we are grateful for that. In one village the people fed us and gave us these clothes to keep the children warm at night.”
Whether it was her words or the tone of her voice, Rosalind was not sure, but when the head bandit looked around at the group of wounded and bedraggled missionaries, tears formed in the corners of his eyes. He turned around to face his men. “These people have suffered enough,” he yelled. “We will not bother them anymore.” Then he turned to Rosalind. “This is a very dangerous road,” he said with the seriousness of a good friend. “In fact, this road is so dangerous you should not go on alone. I will go with you to protect you.” With that he clambered up onto the front cart and plunked himself down between Rosalind and the cart owner.
All day the bandit sat with them, fending off those who reached up to grab at the missionaries and yelling at those who were poised to attack. With his help, they made it safely through the rest of the day’s journey. As night fell, the bandit told Rosalind he would have to leave. Once again they found themselves outside another walled town where they would have to find “shelter” for the night. By now Jonathan was lapsing in and out of consciousness. His wounds were over thirty hours old, and in the brief moments that he was alert and awake, he knew they would have to be properly cleaned with antiseptic soon or gangrene would set in and he would surely die.
It looked increasingly as though Jonathan might die of something far speedier than gangrene, however. The crowd that gathered around the carts as they entered the town gate had become violent. Men and women were chanting, “Kill the foreigners,” and even the smallest children were picking up rocks and hurling them at the group.
Somehow Jonathan managed to pull himself up to a sitting position. As he looked out over the hopeless situation, he suddenly heard a familiar name: “Ku-Mu-shih” (Pastor Goforth). Someone was calling his name in Chinese!
“I am here,” he yelled back, watching intently as the crowd parted and two well-dressed young men emerged. Jonathan gave a cry of joy when he saw them. They were the two sons of one of his influential friends in Changte. He reached out his hand to greet them.
The taller of the two brothers climbed up on the cart and yelled at the crowd. “These people are good foreigners. They are friends of my father, and they work in Changte to bring happiness to our people. When I visited Changte last spring, this man took my father and me through his house, allowing me to look at everything he owned. Then he offered my father and me tea, and we talked for a long time together. We must offer him and his band the same hospitality,” he said.
Jonathan was not sure exactly what position the young man held in the town. It must have been a respected one, because as soon as the young man said these words, the mood of the crowd completely changed. Now they could not do enough to help the missionaries. Jonathan and Dr. Leslie were gently carried into the inn and laid on the brick k’ang that served as the main bed.
Rosalind unwound the filthy, blood-incrusted bandages from around Jonathan’s neck and left arm. She recoiled when she saw the gaping wound on the back of his skull. Jonathan knew it must look awful by now, but apart from bathing it in water, there was not much that could be done for it.
As Rosalind swabbed the stab wounds on her husband’s arm with some warm water, there was a knock at the door, and the younger of the two brothers entered the inn. “This parcel was left for you by a party of engineers who came through two days ago, Ku-Mu-shih. That is how my brother and I knew to expect you.” He held out a small bundle wrapped in linen cloth.
“Thank you,” replied Rosalind as she unwrapped the bundle with trembling hands. She let out a gasp of delight and held up a dark brown medicine bottle. “Look, Jonathan!” she exclaimed. “It’s a bottle of antiseptic liquid. Thank God! How did the engineers know we would be needing this!”
