“I get you. Well, I’ll sure try.”
“You can do it. As soon as possible we’ll send someone to relieve Alec and let him try his hand alone in Cheyenne. It’s not a big place; if he flops it won’t matter too much. But I’m betting he can take Cheyenne.
Now you go take Salt Lake City.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Denver, Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco.
Kansas City, Chicago, Little Rock. New Orleans, Detroit, Jersey City.
Riverside, Five Points, Butler, Hackettstown, Natick, Long Beach, Yuma,
Fresno, Amarillo, Grants, Parktown, Bremerton, Coronado, Worcester,
Wickenberg, Santa Ana, Vicksburg, LaSalle, Morganfield, Blaisville,
Barstow, Wallkyll, Boise, Yakima, St. Augustine, Walla Walla, Abilene,
Chattahoochee, Leeds, Laramie, Globe, South Norwalk, Corpus Christi.
“Peace be unto you! Peace, it’s wonderful! Come, all you sick and heavy laden! Come! Bring your troubles to .the temple of the Lord Mota. Enter the sanctuary where the Masters dare not follow. Hold up your heads as white men, for ‘The Disciple is Coming!’
“Your baby daughter is dying from typhoid? Bring her in! Bring her in!
Let the golden rays of Tamar make her well again. Your job is gone and you face the labor camps? Come in! Come in! Sleep on the benches and eat at the table that is never bare. There will be work aplenty for you to do; you can be a pilgrim and carry the word to others. You need only profit by instruction.
“Who pays for it all? Why, Lord love you, man, gold is the gift of Mota!
Hurry! ‘The Disciple is coming!’ ”
They poured in. At first they came through curiosity, because this new and startling and cockeyed religion was a welcome diversion from painful and monotonous facts of their slavelike existences. Ardmore’s instinctive belief in flamboyant advertising justified itself in results; a more conventional, a more dignified cult would never have received the “house” that this one did.
Having come to be entertained, they came back for other reasons. Free food, and no questions asked who minded singing a few innocuous hymns when they could stay for supper? Why, those priests could afford to buy luxuries that Americans rarely saw on their own tables, butter, oranges, good lean meat, paying for them at the Imperial storehouses with hard gold coin that brought smiles to the faces of the Asiatic bursars.
Besides that, the local priest was always good for a touch if a man was really hard up for the necessary. Why be fussy about creeds? Here was a church that did not ask a man to subscribe to its creeds; you could come and enjoy all the benefits and never be asked to give up your old-time religion — or even be asked if you had a religion. Sure, the priests and their acolytes appeared to take their god-with-six-attributes pretty seriously, but what of it? That was their business. Haven’t we always believed in religious freedom? Besides, you had to admit they did good work.
Take Tamar, Lady of Mercy, now — maybe there was something to it. If you’ve seen a child choking to death with diphtheria, and seen it put to sleep by the server of Shaam, then washed in the golden rays of Tamar, and then seen it walk out an hour later, perfectly sound and whole, you begin to wonder. With half the doctors dead, with the army and a lot of the rest sent to concentration camps, anyone who could cure disease had to be taken seriously. What if it did look like superstitious mumbo jumbo? Aren’t we a practical people? It’s results that count.
But cutting more deeply than the material advantages, were the psychological benefits. The temple of Mota was a place — where a man could hold up his head and not be afraid, something he could not do even in his own home. “Haven’t you heard? Why, they say that no flatface has ever set foot in one of their temples, even to inspect. They can’t even get in by disguising themselves as white men; something knocks them out cold, right at the door. Personally, I think those apes are scared to death of Mota. I don’t know what it is they’ve got, but you can breathe easy in the temple. Come along with me — you’ll see!”