"You have! How did you get to know Him?"
"Through that little book and by following its teachings."
Cameron turned over the pages again, catching familiar phrases here and there as he had heard them sometimes in Sunday school years ago.
"You said something about a promise. What was it?"
"That you'll carry the book with you always, and read at least a verse in it every day."
"Well, that doesn't sound hard," mused Cameron. "I guess I could stand for that."
"The book is yours, then. Would you like to put your name to that acceptance card in the front of the book?"
"What's that?" asked Cameron sharply as if he had discovered the fly in the ointment for which he had all along been suspicious.
"Well, I call it the first step in knowing God. It's your act of acceptance of the way God has planned for you to be forgiven and saved from sin. If you sign that you say you will accept Christ as your Saviour."
"But suppose you don't believe in Christ? I can't commit myself to anything like that till I know about it?"
"Well, you see, that's the first move in getting to know God," said the stranger with a smile. "God says he wants you to believe in his Son. He asks that much of you if you want to get to know Him."
Cameron looked at him with bewildered interest. Was here a possible answer to the questions of his heart. Why did this curious boy have a light in his face that never came from earth or air? What was there about his simple earnestness that was so convincing?
Another crap game had started up on the other side of them. A musically inclined private was playing ragtime on the piano, and another was trying to accompany him on the banjo. The air was hazier than ever. It seemed strange to be talking of such things in these surroundings: "Let's get out of here and walk!" said Cameron, "I'd like to understand what you mean."
For two hours they tramped across the frozen ground and talked, arguing this way and that, much drawn toward one another. At last in the solemn background of a wall of whispering pines that shut them away from the stark gray rows of barracks, Cameron took out his fountain pen and with his foot on a prone log, opened the little book on his knee and wrote his name and the date. Then he put it in his breast pocket with the solemn feeling that he had taken some kind of a great step toward what his soul had been longing to find. They knelt on the frozen ground beside that log and the stranger prayed simply as if he were talking to a friend. Thereafter that spot was hallowed ground to Cameron, to which he came often to think and to read his little book.