"You done just right," she said. "The Lord has brought you and Mother Abagail is going to feed you.
"You're all welcome here!" she added, raising her voice. "We can't stay long, but before we do any moving on, we'll rest, and break bread together, and have some fellowship one with the other."
The little girl piped up from the safety of the driver's arms: "Are you the oldest lady in the world?"
The fiftyish woman said: "Shhhh, Gina!"
But Mother Abagail only put a hand on her hip and laughed. "Mayhap I am, child. Mayhap I am."
She got them to spread her red-checked tablecloth on the far side of the apple tree and the two women, Olivia and June, spread the picnic lunch while the men went off to pick corn. It was short work to boil it up, and while there was no real butter, she had plenty of oleo and salt.
There was little talk during the meal - mostly the sound of chomping jaws and little grunts of pleasure. It did her heart good to see folks dig into a meal, and these folks were doing her spread full justice. It made her walk to Richardsons' and her tussle with those weasels seem more than worthwhile. It wasn't that they were hungry, exactly, but when you've spent a month eating almost nothing that hasn't come out of a can, you get a powerful hunger for something fresh and just cooked special. She herself put away three pieces of chicken, an ear of cons, and a little smidge of that strawberry-rhubarb pie. When it was all gone, she felt as full as a bedtick in a mattress.
When they got settled and the coffee was poured, the driver, a pleasant, open-faced man named Ralph Brentner, told her: "That was one dilly of a meal, ma'am. I can't remember when anything hit the spot so good. Thanks are in order."
The others murmured agreement. Nick smiled and nodded.
The little girl said, "Can I come and sit with you, grammylady?"
"I think you'd be too heavy, honey," the older woman, Olivia Walker, said.
"Nonsense," Abagail said. "The day I can't take a little one on my lap for a spell will be the day they wind me in my shroud. Come on over, Gina."
Ralph carried her over and set her down. "When she gets too heavy, you just tell me." He tickled Gina's face with the feather in his hatband. She put up her hands and giggled. "Don't tickle me, Ralph! Don't you dare tickle me!"
"Don't worry," Ralph said, relenting. "I'm too full to tickle anyone for long." He sat down again.
"What happened to your leg, Gina?" Abagail asked.
"I broke it when I fell out of the barn," Gina said. "Dick fixed it. Ralph says Dick saved my life." She blew a kiss to the man with the steel-rimmed glasses, who blushed a bit, coughed, and smiled.
Nick, Tom Cullen, and Ralph had happened on Dick Ellis halfway across Kansas, walking along the side of the road with a pack on his back and a hiking staff in one hand. He was a veterinarian. The next day, passing through the small town of Lindsborg, they had stopped for lunch and heard weak cries coming from the south side of town. If the wind had been blowing the other way, they never would have heard the cries at all.
"God's mercy," Abby said complacently, stroking the little girl's hair.
Gina had been on her own for three weeks. She'd been playing in the hayloft of her uncle's barn a day or two before when the rotted flooring gave way, spilling her forty feet into the lower haymow. There had been hay in it to break her fall, but she had cartwheeled off it and broken her leg. At first Dick Ellis had been pessimistic about her chances. He gave her a local anesthetic to set the leg; she had lost so much weight and her overall physical condition was so poor he had been afraid a general would kill her (the key words in this conversation were spelled out while Gina McCone played unconcernedly with the buttons on Mother Abagail's dress).
Gina had bounced back with a speed that had surprised them all. She had formed an instant attachment for Ralph and his jaunty hat. Speaking in a low, diffident voice, Ellis said he suspected that a lot of her problem had been crushing loneliness.
"Course it was," Abagail said. "If you'd missed her, she would have just pined away."
Gina yawned. Her eyes were large and glassy.
"I'll take her now," Olivia Walker said.
"Put her in the little room at the end of the hall," Abby said. "You can sleep with her, if that's what you want. This other girl... what did you say your name was, honey? It's slipped my mind for sure."
"June Brinkmeyer," the redhead said.
"Well, you c'n sleep with me, June, unless you've some other mind. The bed ain't big enough for two, and I don't think you'd want to sleep with an old bundle of sticks like me even if it was, but there's a mattress put away overhead that should do you if the bugs ain't got into it. One of these big men will get it down for you, I guess."