The Miracle Man Part 6

"I might just as well be frank with you, Mr. Higgins," he said. "I've never taken much stock in faith cure and that sort of thing."

"Mabbe," suggested Mr. Higgins deeply, "you ain't had much experience."

"No," confessed Madison reflectively; "I haven't--I haven't had any."

"Well then, you just wait an' see," said Mr. Higgins, waving his mittened hand as though the whole matter were conclusively settled. "You just wait an' see."

"But I'm afraid I don't quite understand," prodded Madison innocently.

"What kind of cures does he perform?"

They turned a right-angled bend in the road, disclosing a straggling hamlet in a hollow below, and, farther away in the distance, a sweep of ocean.

"Most any kind," said Mr. Higgins. "There's Needley now. All you've got to do is ask the first person you see about him."

"Yes," said Madison, "but take yourself, for instance. Did this Patriarch ever do anything for you?"

"He did," said Mr. Higgins impressively. "An' 'twasn't but last week.

I'm glad you asked me. For two nights I couldn't sleep. Had the earache powerful. Poured hot oil an' laud'num into it, an' kept a hot brick rolled up in flannel against it, but didn't do no good. Then Mrs.

Higgins says, 'Hiram, why in the land's sake don't you go out an' see the Patriarch?' An' I hitched right up, an' every step that horse took I could feel it gettin' better, an' I wasn't five minutes with the Patriarch before I was cured, an' I ain't had a twinge since."

"It certainly looks as though there were something in that," admitted Madison cautiously.

Hiram Higgins smiled a world of tolerance.

"'Tain't worth mentionin' alongside some of the things he's done," he said deprecatingly. "You'll hear about 'em fast enough."

"What's the local doctor say about it?" asked Madison.

"There ain't enough pickin's to keep a doctor here, though some of 'em's tried," chuckled Mr. Higgins. "Have to have 'em for _some_ things, of course--an' then he drives over from Barton's Mills, seven miles from here."

"And do _all_ the people in Needley believe in the Patriarch?"--Madison's voice was full of grave interest.

"Well," said Mr. Higgins, "to be plumb downright honest with you, they don't. Folks as was born here an' are old inhabitants do, but the Holmes, bein' newcomers, is kinder set in their ways. They come down here eight years ago last August with new-fangled notions, which they ain't got rid of yet. You can see the consequences for yourself--got a little boy, twelve year old, walking around lame on a crutch--an' I reckon he always will. Doctor looks at him every time he comes over from Barton's Mills, but it don't do no good. Folks tried to get the Holmes to take him out to the Patriarch's till they got discouraged. 'Pears old man Holmes kinder got around to a common sense view of it, but the women folks say Mrs. Holmes is stubborner than all git-out, an' that old man Holmes' voice ain't loud enough to be heerd when she gets goin'. 'Tain't but fair to mention 'em, as I dunno of any one else that's an exception." Mr. Higgins pointed ahead with his whip. "See them woods over there beyond the town?"

"Yes," said Madison.

"That's where the Patriarch lives," said Mr. Higgins. "On the other side of 'em, down by the seash.o.r.e. An' here we be most home. Folks'll be glad to see you, Mr. Madison, and now you're here I hope you'll make a real smart stay--we'll try to make you feel to home."

"Thank you," said Madison cordially. "I haven't any idea, of course, how long I'll be here--it all depends on circ.u.mstances."

"No," said Mr. Higgins; "I don't suppose you have. Anyway, I hope you'll take a notion to go out an' see what the Patriarch can do for you. An'

now you ain't told me yet which hotel you're goin' to."

"Oh!" said Madison gravely. "Well, since you recommend it, I guess we'd better make it the Congress."

--IV--

THE PATRIARCH

"Bet you a cookie," shrilled Hiram Higgins, in what he meant to be a breathless whisper, "that there's where he's goin' now--only he don't want us to know he's give in."

"Shet your fool mouth, Hiram!" cautioned Walt Perkins, the proprietor of the Congress Hotel. "He kin hear you."

"Get out!" retorted Mr. Higgins. "No, he can't neither. He ain't feelin'

no ways perky, any one can see that, an' I'm tickled most to pieces that he's come 'round--I've took up with him consid'rable, I have.

Patriarch'll just make a new-born critter outer him--you watch through the window where he goes. Bet you a quarter that's what he's up to!"

John Garfield Madison, outside on the veranda of the Congress Hotel, smiled at the words, as he lighted his cigar and turned up his coat collar. He stepped off the veranda, crossed the little lawn to the village street, and began to saunter nonchalantly and indifferently oceanwards. He did not look around--he had no desire to bring consternation to the ma.s.sed faces of the leading citizens flattened against the window panes--but he chuckled inwardly as he pictured them.

There would be Hiram Higgins, postmaster and town constable, Walt Perkins, hotel man and town moderator, Lem Hodges, selectman, a.s.sessor and overseer of the poor, Nathan Elmes, likewise selectman, a.s.sessor and overseer of the poor, and Cale Rodgers, school committee-man and proprietor of the general store.

Madison sauntered slowly along.

"I have arrived," he said, "not at a cemetery, but at an El Dorado and a land flowing with milk and honey."

There was a humorous pucker around the corners of Madison's eyes, as he reviewed his two days' sojourn in Needley--spent mostly in the "office"

of the Congress Hotel beside the stove with his feet up on the wood-box.

He had never lacked company--the office stove and the spitbox filled with sawdust was the admitted rendezvous of the chosen spirits who were still gazing after him from the window. Morning, afternoon and evening they congregated there, and he had been promptly admitted to members.h.i.+p in the select circle. At each sitting they had discussed the spring planting and the weather, and then inevitably, led by Hiram Higgins, had resolved themselves into an "experience" meeting on the Patriarch--he, Madison, as a minority leader of one, grudgingly conceding an occasional point. The sessions had invariably ended the same way--Hiram Higgins, with the back of his hand underneath his chin, would stroke earnestly at his chin-whiskers, and remark:

"Well, now, Mr. Madison, 'twon't do you a mite of harm to go out there an' see for yourself. We've kinder got to look on you as one of us, an'

there ain't no use in you sufferin' around with what ails you when there ain't no need of it."

Madison's replies had been equally void of versatility--he would shake his head doubtfully, while his cigar-case circulated around the group.

Madison sniffed luxuriously at his thoroughbred Havana. He had pa.s.sed out of sight of the hotel window now, and he swung into a brisk walk. It was a mile to the Patriarch's by a wagon track through the woods, that led off from the road to the left just across the bridge. He had not needed to ask directions. With magnificent inadvertence Hiram Higgins had mentioned the exact way to reach the Patriarch's a dozen times, if he had once. Also, by now, Madison had learned all that the town knew about the Patriarch--which after all, he reflected with some satisfaction, wasn't much. The Patriarch was over eighty years of age, and he had come, deaf and dumb, to Needley sixty years ago--n.o.body knew from where, nor his previous history, nor his name. They had called him the Hermit at first, for immediately on his arrival he had gone out to the sh.o.r.e of the ocean, away from the village, and built a crude hut there for himself--which, in the after years, he had made into a more pretentious dwelling. The cures had come "kinder gradual-like an' took the folks mabbe forty years to get around to believin' in him real serious," as Hiram Higgins put it; and then, as the Hermit grew old, and the local reverence for him had become more deep-seated, they had changed his name to the Patriarch. That was about all--but it seemed to suit Madison, for his smile broadened.

"I wonder," said he to himself, as he stepped onto the bridge to cross the little river, "if I'm not dreaming--this is like being let loose in the U.S. Treasury with n.o.body looking!"

"Hullo, mister!" piped a young voice suddenly out of the dusk.

"Hullo!" responded Madison mechanically--and turned to watch a small figure, going in the opposite direction, thump by him on a crutch.

Madison stopped and stared after the cripple--and removed his cigar very slowly from his lips. "That's that Holmes boy," he muttered. "I don't know as he'd look well on the platform when the excursion trains get to running. Wonder if I can't get a job for his father somewhere about a thousand miles from here and have the family move!"

The cripple disappeared down the road, and Madison, with a sort of speculative flip to the ash of his cigar, resumed his way. Just across the bridge he found the wagon track, and turned into it. It ran through a thick wood of fir and spruce, and here, apart from now being able to see but little before him--he had elected to "steal" away in the darkness after supper--he found the going far from good.

Half curiously, half whimsically, he tried to visualize the Patriarch from the word pictures that had been painted around the stove in the hotel office. The man would be old--of course. And to have lived alone for sixty years, to have shunned human companions.h.i.+p he must have been either mildly or violently insane to begin with, which would account for his belief in himself as a healer--he would unquestionably, in some form or other, "have bats in his belfry," as Pale Face Harry had put it.

Madison's brows contracted as he went along. A man living by himself under such conditions, with no incentive for the care of his person, not even the pride engendered by the a.s.sociation of others, erudite as the standard might be in his vicinity, was apt to grow very shortly into a somewhat sorry spectacle. Give him sixty years of this and add an unbalanced mind, and--Madison did not like the picture that now rose up suddenly before him--a creature, bent, vapid of face, deaf and dumb, frowsy of dress, and a world removed from the thought of a morning bath.

It might be picturesque in a way--but it wasn't a way Madison liked.

Somehow, he'd have to jerk the old chap out of his rut and get him rigged up a little more becomingly, before the trusting public, simple as they were, were invited down to see the exhibit. Madison's dramatic instinct, which was developed to a keen sense of what the public craved for, rebelled against any _faux pas_ in the scenic effects. He fell to designing a costume that would more appropriately expound the role.

"Got to give 'em something for their money," murmured John Garfield Madison. "Some sort of long, flowing robe now, washed every day, sort of Grecian effect with a rope girdle, bare feet and sandals--um-m--dunno about the sandals--don't want to slop over, and besides"--Madison grinned a little to himself--"he might kick!"

Still reflecting, but arrived at no conclusion other than first to size up the Patriarch and see how best to handle him, Madison reached the end of the wagon track--and halted.