To the yearning voice Conrad could make no answer. Arm in arm father and son stood for a long time. Then, when the moon had sunk behind the little church, Conrad felt himself led away.
"Now, my son," admonished John Conrad, "weep no more, but set your face forward."
The night of the twenty-third of June is a short night at best. When one robs its beginning of four or five hours, there is little darkness left. Bidding his son go to bed, John Conrad spent the night in vigil. In spite of his reminder that this was not a time for grief, he went again to the little church. From thence he climbed through the ruined vineyards to the pastures on the hill where his father and his grandfather had pastured their sheep and cattle. There he stood long and looked about him, his mind traveling back to the happiness of their peaceful lives, spent in sturdy labor and sweetened by the honor which they had had among their fellows. Here were the roots of his own life, deep in the soil--would God that he could stay where he had been born! He was no longer young, responsibility and adversity had made him old. Those rosy stories of the new land--might they not be as other travelers' tales, concealing a reality worse than this fearful present of hunger and fear? Five hundred miles of river, three thousand miles of sea, and then an unsettled country! The same shapes of fear which had fascinated and disturbed young Conrad seemed now to await his father behind every tree and bush.
Suddenly John Conrad heard a soft sound on the summer wind. George Reimer, as restless as himself, was somewhere about with his dear flute. John Conrad bent his ear to the direction from which the sound came. It was a German hymn, "A Mighty Stronghold is Our God." John Conrad lifted his head and with it his heart. George Reimer would be with them and George Reimer's flute. Returning to his house, John Conrad lay down for a little sleep before dawn.
But George Reimer did not go to the new country. Upon the indescribable confusion of the Weiser house the next morning, he came smiling.
Into sheets and coverlets the Weisers had tied all their movable possessions, the various articles making curious knobs and projections on the great bundles. The family spinning-wheel must go--surely no article was more necessary! This Conrad was to carry on his back. The few cooking-pots which remained--these must be taken, though all else were left behind. Wardrobes were small, sheets were few, pillows did not exist. The feather beds could not be carried--these were given to the neighbors.