t watchers to guard David's house and make sure that he did
not escape in the night, and though they did not go into the house to
kill him at once, because of an old Oriental superstition that only
evil would come to those who entered a home by night, they planned to
enter at daybreak and arrest him.

Michal, with a woman's keen instinct, when she saw the messengers
outside, guessed their purpose and at once she said to David:

"If thou save not thy life to-night, to-morrow, thou shalt be slain,"
and then she told David of her plan to save him, which he thought was a
good one. After a hasty farewell, she assisted her husband to escape
through a window on the opposite side of the house from where the
king's messengers were crouched, and David under cover of the darkness
crept stealthily away and escaped once more from Saul's hand. When she
had seen him creep away in the darkness, Michal went back into the
house and dressing up an image, as if it were a man, she laid it in
David's bed, and covered it, head and all, with a long thick coverlet,
and at dawn when Saul's messengers forced an entrance, demanding David,
Michal answered:

"He is sick."

The men went away and told Saul this, but he did not believe it, and
sent them back to bring David to the palace in his bed, if they found
him too sick to walk, and it must have been a moment of triumph for
Michal, who had worked so hard to save her husband's life, and who knew
that he was, even then, far away, when she led Saul's messengers to the
bed, where they found, not their victim, but only an image.

When Saul heard of this, his rage was almost beyond bounds, but Michal
did not care, for she knew that David was safe now, and her answers to
her father's reproaches at her conduct in helping David to escape were
as fearless as possible.

All this took time, and meanwhile, David, now an outcast from his home,
had hurried to Ramah, a city on a height about three miles west of
Gibeah, where he found Samuel at the School of Prophets, and when he
told Samuel all that Saul had done to him, Samuel felt sorely against
Saul, and went with David to Naioth, hoping that they might in that way
escape Saul's messengers, who David knew would surely discover and
follow him. And he was right. No sooner had David reached Ramah than
Saul did find it out, and sent soldiers to arrest him, but three
different bands which he sent, one after another, when they came to the
School of Prophets b