Collection 1997 - End Of The Drive (v5.0) Read Online Free PDF

preaching.
    â€œWhat has happened?” he asked. “I miss the sound of the hammer. The sounds of labor are blessed in the ears of the Lord.”
    â€œColvin fell,” Brace said. “He fell from the roof and was killed.”
    Brother Elisha looked at him out of his great dark eyes and he said, “There is no death. None pass on but for the Glory of the Lord, and I feel this one passed before his time.”
    â€œYou may think there’s no death,” Brace said, “but Ed Colvin looks mighty dead to me.”
    He turned his eyes on Brace. “O, ye of little faith: Take me to him.”
    When we came into Doc McDonald’s the air was foul with liquor, and Brace glared at Doc like he’d committed a blasphemy. Brother Elisha paused briefly, his nose twitching, and then he walked through to the back room where Ed Colvin lay.
    We paused at the door, clustered there, not knowing what to expect, but Brother Elisha walked up and bowed his head, placing the palm of his right hand on Colvin’s brow, and then he prayed. Never did I know a man who could make a prayer fill a room with sound like Brother Elisha, but there at the last he took Ed by the shoulders and he pulled him into a sitting position and he said, “Edward Colvin, your work upon this earth remains unfinished. For the Glory of the Lord…
Rise
!”
    And I’ll be forever damned if Ed Colvin didn’t take a long gasping breath and sit right up on that table. He looked mighty confused and Brother Elisha whispered in his ear for a moment and then with a murmur of thanks Ed Colvin got up and walked right out of the place.
    We stood there like we’d been petrified, and I don’t know what we’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this. Brother Elisha said, “The Lord moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.” And then he left us.
    Brace looked at me and I looked at Ralston and when I started to speak my mouth was dry. And just then we heard the sound of a hammer.
    When I went outside people were filing into the street and they were looking up at that barn, staring at Ed Colvin, working away as if nothing had happened. When I passed Damon, standing in the bank door, his eyes were wide open and his face white. I spoke to him but he never even heard me or saw me. He was just standing there staring at Colvin.
    By nightfall everybody in town was whispering about it, and when Sunday morning came they flocked to hear him preach, their faces shining, their eyes bright as though with fever.
    When the reverend stepped into the pulpit, Brennen was the only one there besides me.
    Reverend Sanderson looked stricken, and that morning he talked in a low voice, speaking quietly and sincerely but lacking his usual force. “Perhaps,” he said as we left, “perhaps it is we who are wrong. The Lord gives the power of miracles to but few.”
    â€œThere are many kinds of miracles,” Brennen replied, “and one miracle is to find a sane, solid man in a town that’s running after a red wagon.”
    As the three of us walked up the street together we heard the great rolling voice of Brother Elisha: “And I say unto you that the gift of life to Brother Colvin was but a sign, for on the morning of the coming Sabbath we shall go hence to the last resting place of your loved ones, and there I shall cause them all to be raised, and they shall live again, and take their places among you as of old!”
    You could have dropped a feather. We stood on the street in back of his congregation and we heard what he said, but we didn’t believe it, we couldn’t believe it.
    He was going to bring back the dead.
    Brother Elisha, who had brought Ed Colvin back to life, was now going to empty the cemetery, returning to life all those who had passed on…and some who had been helped.
    â€œThe Great Day has come!” He lifted his long arms and spread them wide, and his sonorous voice rolled