The Miracle Man by Frank L. Packard

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"T'anks!" said the Flopper pleasantly--and wriggled himself into a more
comfortable position in his chair.

Half an hour later, the train, that stopped only on signal to discharge
eastbound passengers from Portland, drew up at Needley--and Hiram
Higgins, on the platform, stared at a scene never before witnessed in
the history of the town.

It was not one passenger, or two, or three, that alighted--they streamed
in a bewildering fashion from every vestibule of every car. It is true
that the majority got back into the train later, but that did not lessen
the effect any on Mr. Higgins. Mr. Higgins' jaw dropped, and he grabbed
at his chin whiskers for support.

"Merciful daylights!" he breathed heavily. "Now what in the land's sakes
be it all about?" His eyes, following the hurrying passengers, fixed on
the twisted shape of the Flopper, being helped to the platform from the
private car.

"Three cheers for Coogan!" yelled some excitable passenger.

The cheers were given with a will.

"Good luck to you, Coogan!" shouted another--and the crowd took it up
in chorus: "Good luck to you, Coogan!"

"_Coogan!_"--Mr. Higgins' face paled, and he took a firmer grip on his
whiskers. "Now if you ain't gone an' put your fool foot in it, Hiram
Higgins," he said miserably. "If that there's the fellow that you writ
to, you've just laid out to make a plumb fool of the Patriarch, 'cause I
reckon the Almighty knew His own mind when He made a critter like that,
an' didn't calc'late to have His work upsot much this side of the
grave--not even by the Patriarch."

--IX--

THE PILGRIMAGE

Faith is an inheritance common to the human race; and the human race in
its daily life, in its daily dealings, man to man, could not go on
without it--but faith is a matter of degree. Faith, in the abstract, the
element of it, is inborn in every soul; and while dormant, until put to
a crucial test along any given line, is boundless and unlimited--a sort
of tacitly accepted, existing state, unquestioned. Faith in many is a
sturdy, virile thing--to a certain point. It is the fire that proves.

Needley had faith in the Patriarch--a faith that never before had been
questioned. But Needley had more than that--Needley held the Patriarch
in affection, as a cherished thing, almost sacredly, almost as an idol.
Faith the simple people of Needley had always had--to a certain
point--but it faltered before this grotesque, inhuman, twisted shape
that squatted in the road before the Congress Hotel like a hideous
caricature of an abnormal toad. Their faith failed to bridge the span
that gave the Patriarch power over such as this, and they saw their idol
shattered in their own eyes, and held up to mockery before the eyes of
these strangers who had so suddenly and tempestuously swarmed upon them.

Hiram Higgins, seeking out Doc Madison inside the hotel, was in a state
bordering on distraction.

"I druve him over from the station 'cause he couldn't walk, him an' a
man, an' two women, an' a wheel-chair," Mr. Higgins explained. "But
what's to be done now? He wants me to drive him out to the Patriarch's.
I got faith in the Patriarch, but I never said he could work
miracles--there ain't no one on earth could straighten that critter out.
Don't stand to reason that the Patriarch's to be made a fool of."

"Certainly not," agreed Madison emphatically. "It's most unfortunate. I
suppose all of us here in Needley"--he looked around at the assembled
group of leading citizens--"feel the same way, too?"

"Of course we do," said Mr. Higgins helplessly. "Couldn't feel no ways
else."

Madison laid his hand suddenly, impressively, upon Mr. Higgins' shoulder
and looked meaningly into Mr. Higgins' eyes--and into the eyes of the
selectmen, the overseers of the poor, the general-store proprietor, and
the school committee.

"Don't drive him over, then," he said significantly. "Don't any of the
rest of you do it either--and tell everybody else not to. Make him
_crawl_. If he's determined to go, let him get there by himself if he
can, make him crawl--he'll never be able to do it."

"That's so," said Mr. Higgins, brightening, while the others nodded;
then, dubiously: "But s'pose he _does_ get there--how be we goin' to
stop him?"

"If he can get there by himself you can't stop him," said Madison
seriously. "You can't do anything like that. To use force would be
carrying things too far, and would only place the Patriarch in a worse
light. If this fellow--what's his name?--Coogan?--can crawl there, let
him--that's his own business. None of _us_ are encouraging him, the
Patriarch didn't ask him to come, and no one has a right to expect
miracles--so it can't hurt the Patriarch seriously under those
conditions. Besides, if this Coogan has got faith enough to crawl that
mile, who knows what might happen--make him crawl."

Mr. Higgins, with a grim nod, headed a determined exodus from the hotel
office--and Madison strolled out onto the veranda.

Needley was in a furor. The news spread like an oil-fed conflagration.
The farmers left their work in the fields and hurried into the village;
from the houses and cottages came the women and children to cluster
around the Congress Hotel; from the station, scarcely of less interest
to the inhabitants than the Flopper himself, straggled in those curious
enough to have left the train, nearly a dozen of them--and amongst them
Pale Face Harry coughed, as he trudged laboriously along.

Larger and larger grew the circle around the Flopper, filling and
blocking the road, overflowing into front yards, and massing on the
little lawn of the hotel clear up to the veranda--until fields and
houses were deserted, and to the last inhabitant Needley was there.

Upon the ground squatted the Flopper, his eyes sweeping the ring of
faces that was like a wall around him--the grinning faces of his fellow
passengers from the train; the stony, concerned and rather sullen faces
of the men of Needley; the anxious, excited faces of the women; the
bewildered, curious and somewhat frightened faces of the children, who
pushed and shoved their elders for better vantage ground.

The Flopper licked his lips, and renewed the appeal he had been making
for nearly five minutes.

"Ain't no one goin' to drive me out to de Patriarch's?"

"Horses are all busy in the fields," said a voice, uncompromisingly.

"Yes," said the Flopper, with bitter irony, "drivin' each other around,
while youse are here starin' at me an' won't help."

His eyes caught Doc Madison's from the veranda and held an instant to
read a message and interpret the almost imperceptible, but significant,
movement of Madison's head.

"Gee!" said the Flopper to himself, as his eyes swept the faces around
him again. "Dis is a nice game de Doc's planted on me--he wants me to
do de wiggle out dere fer de rubes! Ain't dey a peachy lot--look at de
saucer eyes on de kids!"

Mrs. Thornton, in her wheel-chair on the inner edge of the circle,
turned to her husband.

"It's very strange that no one seems willing to drive him," she said.

"Oh, not very," responded Thornton, with a short laugh. "I don't blame
them--they don't want this healer of theirs made a monkey of."

"If no one will drive him, he shall have my wheel-chair," announced Mrs.
Thornton impulsively. "I think it is a perfect shame--the poor man!"

"Nonsense!" said Thornton gruffly. "You'll do nothing of the kind."

"Yes, Robert, I will," declared Mrs. Thornton with determination. She
leaned forward and called to the Flopper. "Mr. Coogan," she said
anxiously, "if you can't find any other way of getting out there, I want
you to take this chair of mine--you'll be able to manage with it, I am
sure."

The Flopper looked at her with gratitude--but shook his head--mindful of
Doc Madison.

"T'anks, mum," he said, "but I couldn't t'ink of it--you needs it more'n
me."

"Please do," she insisted.

"T'anks, mum," said the Flopper again, "but I couldn't. You needs it,
an' I can get along widout it. Dey're stallin' on me, but I can get dere
by myself if any one'll show me de way."

"I'll show you, mister," piped a shrill voice--and young Holmes on his
crutch hopped into the circle. "I'll show you, mister--an' 'tain't fur,
neither."

"Swipe me!" muttered the Flopper, as he surveyed the lad. "Dis is de
limit fer fair!" Perturbed and uncertain what to do, he tried to catch
Doc Madison's eye again, but a movement in the crowd had hidden Madison.

Some one in the crowd, the lingerie drummer, getting the grim humor of
the situation, laughed--and the laugh came like a challenge, taunting
the quick-tempered, turbulent soul of the Flopper.

"Come on, mister!" urged the boy excitedly. "'Tain't fur--I'll show
you."

"God bless you, son," said the Flopper, while he flung an inward curse
at the man who had laughed. "Son, God bless you fer yer good heart--go
ahead--I'll stick to you."

The crowd opened, making a lane through which the boy stumped on his
crutch, his face flushed and eager, and through which the Flopper
followed, slowly, rocking from side to side as he helped himself along
with the palm of his left hand flat in the dust of the road, trailing
his wobbling leg behind him.

The crowd closed in behind and moved forward.

Mrs. Thornton's face was fever-flushed, her eyes bright; in her weak
state she was on the verge of nervous hysteria.

"I want to go, Robert," she cried. "I must go."

"But, my dear," protested Thornton harshly, "this is simply the height
of absurdity. For Heaven's sake be sensible, Naida. Just imagine what
people would say if they saw us here with this outfit of idiots--they'd
think we'd gone mad."

"I don't care what they'd think," she returned feverishly, her frail
fingers plucking nervously at the arms of her chair. "I must go--I
must--I must."

Thornton glanced at the nurse, then stared at his wife--Miss Harvey's
meaning look was hardly necessary to drive home to him the fact that
Mrs. Thornton was in no condition to be denied anything.

Red-faced, Thornton strode to the back of the chair and began to push it
along.

"Of all the damned foolishness that ever I heard of," he gritted
savagely, "this is the worst!" His face went redder still with
mortification. "If this ever leaks out I'll never hear the last of it.
Look at us--bringing up the rear of a gibbering mob of yokels! We're fit
for a padded cell!"

In the crowd, Madison rubbed shoulders for a moment with Pale Face
Harry.

"Who's the party with the wheel-chair behind?" he asked.

"Millionaire--Chicago--private car--Flopper's got the wife going
hard--rode down with them," coughed Pale Face Harry behind his hand.

"I guess I'll get acquainted," said Madison. "Circulate, Harry, and
cough your head off--don't hide your light under a bushel--circulate."
And Madison fell back to scrape acquaintance with the man of millions.

Close-packed upon the road, the procession spread out for a hundred
yards behind the Flopper--bare-footed children; women in multi-colored
gingham and calico; men in the uncouth dress of the fields, the
uncouthness accentuated by the sprinkling of more pretentious clothing
worn by those who had come from the train. And slowly, very slowly, this
conglomerate human cosmorama moved on, undulating queerly with the
variant movements of its component parts, snail-like, for the Flopper's
pace was slow--as strange a spectacle, perhaps, as the human eye had
ever witnessed, something of grimness, something of humor, something of
awe, something of fear exuding from it--it seemed to contain within
itself the range, and to express, the gamut of all human emotion.

On the procession went--so slowly as to be almost sinister in its
movement. And a strange sound rose from it and seemed to float and hover
over it like a weird, invisible, acoustic canopy. Three hundred voices,
men's, women's and children's, rose and fell, rose and fell--at first in
a medley of scoffings, laughter, sullen murmurs, earnest dispute and
children's prattle--a strange composite sound indeed! But as the
minutes passed and the mass moved on and stopped as the Flopper paused
to rest, and moved on and stopped and moved on again, gradually this
changed, very gradually, not abruptly, but as though the scoffings and
the laughter were dying away almost imperceptibly in the distance. For
as the Flopper stopped to rest, those near him gazed upon his face,
distorted, full of muscular distress, sweat pouring from his forehead,
pain and suffering written in every lineament--and drew back whispering
into the crowd, giving place to others until all had seen. And so the
strange sound from this strange congregation grew lower, until it was a
sort of breathless, long-sustained and wavering note, a prescience, a
premonition of something to come, a ghastly mockery or a tragedy to
befall, until it was an awe-struck murmuring thing.

Some spoke to him now and in pity offered to get him a horse and wagon,
offered even to carry him--but the Flopper shook his head.

"'Tain't goin' to be but a few minutes now," he panted in an exalted
voice, "before I'm cured--I got de faith to know dat--I got de faith."

And the crippled lad upon the crutch beside him urged him on. The boy's
face was strained and eager, full of mingled emotions--pride in the
leading part he played, wonder and expectancy.

"Come on, mister, come on!" he kept saying, impatiently accommodating
his own restricted pace to the Flopper's still slower one.

Through the wagon track, through the woods beneath the trees, the dead,
slow, shuffling tread went on--and now even the murmuring sound was
hushed. Men and women stared into each other's faces--children sought
their elders' hands. What did it mean? Faith--yes, they had had
faith--but never faith like this. They looked at the awful deformity
over one another's heads, crawling inch by inch along before
them--watched the stubborn, bitter struggle of pain and suffering of the
wretched man who led them, spurred on by a faith cast in a heroic mold
such as none there had ever dreamed of before--and they spoke no more.
There was only the sound of movement now--and that curiously subdued.
Men seemed to choose their footing, seeking to tread noiselessly, as
though in some solemn presence that awed them and held them in an
intangible, heart-quickening suspense.

Onward they went--following the lurching, wriggling, reeling, broken
thing before them--following the Flopper, his right hand and arm curved
piteously inward to his chin, his neck thrown sideways, his sagging leg
seeming to hold only to his body by spasmodic jerks to catch up with the
body itself, like the steel when detached from the magnet that bounds
forward to re-attach itself again, his eyes starting from his head, his
face bloodless with exertion and twisted as fearfully as were his limbs,
but upon his lips a smile of resolution, of indomitable assurance.

Onward they went--a huddled mass of humanity, literate and illiterate,
of all ages, of all conditions, and none laughed, none grinned, none
smiled, none spoke--all that was past. They stopped, they moved
again--as the Flopper stopped and moved. Occasionally a child cried
out--occasionally there came a discordant, racking cough--that was all.

Tenser grew the very atmosphere they breathed--heavier upon them fell
the sense of something almost supernatural, beyond the human and the
finite. Skeptic and faint believer, sinner, Christian and scoffer, they
were all alike now in the presence of a faith whose evidence was before
them in harrowing vividness, in the torment and agony of a fellow
creature who sought again through faith a restoration to the image of
his kind. There was no creed, no school of ethical belief, no
conflicting orthodoxy to quibble over, no ground on which atheist and
theologian even might stand apart--there was only _faith_--a faith whose
trappings none might take issue with, for it was naked faith and the
trappings were stripped from it--it was faith in its very essence,
boundless, utter, simple, limitless, staggering, appalling them.

Its consummation? That was another thing--a thing that in the presence
of such faith as this brought human pity, sympathy and sorrow to its
full, brought dread and terror. Faith such as this they had never
conceived; faith such as this, if it was to prove a shattered thing, was
for its exponent to drink the very dregs of misery and despair--and
yet, rising above that possibility, flinging grim challenge at their
doubts, stood this very faith, mighty in itself, perfect in its
confidence, heroic in its agony, that all might gaze upon from a common
standpoint and know--as faith.

No whispering breeze stirred the young leaves in the trees; in the
stillness of the afternoon came only the heavy, pulsing throb of
Nature's breathing. One hundred, two, three hundred, they moved along,
slow, sinuous, troubled, their eyes straight before them or upon the
ground at their feet--only the children looked with frightened, startled
eyes into their parents' faces, and clung the closer.

Out upon the wagon track they debouched and spread in a long, thin line
beneath the maples on either side of the Flopper--and waited.

--X--

THE MIRACLE

There was utter silence now--the tread of shuffling feet was gone--no
man moved--it seemed as though no man _breathed_--they stood as carven
things, inanimate, men, women and children strained forward, their faces
drawn, tense and rigid. In the very air, around them, everywhere,
imprisoning them, clutching like an icy hand at the heart, something
unseen, a dread, intangible presence weighed them down and lay heavy
upon them. What was to come? What drear tragedy was to be enacted? What
awful mockery was to fall upon this maimed and mutilated creature within
whose deformed and pitiful body there too was a human soul?

From the cottage door across the lawn came two figures--a girl in
simple, clinging white, her head bowed, the sun itself seeming to caress
the dark brown wealth of hair upon her head, changing it to glinting
strands of burnished copper; and beside her walked the Patriarch, his
hand resting lightly upon her arm, a wondrous figure of a man, majestic,
simple, grand, his silvered-hair bared to the sun, his face illumined.

"There he is, mister!" whispered young Holmes hoarsely. "There he is! Go
on, mister, go on--see what he can do for you!"

There came a sound that was like a great, gasping intake of breath, as
men and women watched. Out toward the Patriarch, alone now, the Flopper
began to wriggle and writhe his way along. God in Heaven have pity! What
was this sight they looked upon--this poor, distorted, mangled thing
that grovelled in the earth--that figure towering there in the sunlight
with venerable white beard and hair, erect, symbolic of some strange,
mystic power that awed them, his head turned slightly in a curious
listening attitude, the sightless eyes closed, upon the face a great
calm like a solemn benediction.

Fell a stillness that was as the stillness of death; came a hush until
in men's ears was the quick, fierce pound and throb of their own hearts.
On, on toward the Patriarch slithered and twisted that frightful
deformity that they had followed over that long, torturing mile--on, on
he went, and they watched scarce drawing breath, their faces white,
their very limbs held as in a palsied, fearsome spell--and then, sudden,
abrupt, terrifying, there rose a shriek, wild, hysterical, prolonged, in
a woman's voice, the cadence wavering from guttural to shrill and ending
in a high-pitched, broken scream.

The Flopper halted and turned himself about, while his left hand swept
his livid face, brushing from it the spurting drops, sweeping back the
damp, tangled hair from his eyes--faced them till they saw an agony on
human countenance that struck, stabbing, to their souls--faced them
while his eyes traversed the long, long line of ghastly white faces
before him, out of which eyes everywhere, row on row of them, straining,
fixed, fascinated, seemed to burn like living fires as they held him in
their focus.

He had not gone far, perhaps ten yards--no more. By the group around the
wheel-chair, almost in the center of the line, stood Madison, his chin
in his hand in a meditative, thoughtful attitude, the single soul who
watched the scene from under lowered lids; Thornton had involuntarily
edged a little forward from behind the chair until he stood now at its
side in a strange, abashed way as though his own personality were
over-ruled, obliterated, his face with a white sternness upon it, his
eyes, like all other eyes, agleam with an unnatural fire; Mrs. Thornton
had pulled herself forward in the chair, one hand clutching at her
breast, the frail fingers of the other woven in a grasp so tight around
the arm of the chair that the flesh was bloodless; a little way off, a
group of three, the two salesmen and the metropolitan newspaper man,
seemed as though stricken into stone, stripped of all assurance, all
complacence, awed, tense, palpitant, as the patched, bare-legged
tatterdemalion of ten from the fields, that stood beside them, was awed
and tense and palpitant.

And away on either side stretched the line of white, rigid faces, the
never-ending, burning eyes--but the silence with that shriek was gone
now, for another woman and another, overwrought, needing but that sudden
shock to unnerve them utterly, shrieked in turn--and through the line
seemed to run a shudder, and it moved a little though no foot stirred,
moved with a strange, sinuous, rocking, swaying movement, from the hips,
backward and forward and to either side. Men raised their eyes, stole
frightened, questioning glances at their neighbors--and fixed their eyes
on the Flopper again--on the Flopper and that majestic figure in the
center of the lawn, so calm of mien, of attitude and pose.

Once again the Flopper's eyes swept the scene. A few feet in advance of
the crowd, as though drawn irresistibly forward, young Holmes hung upon
his crutch. The boy's soul seemed in his face--hope, a world of it, as
he gazed at the Patriarch, sickening fear as he looked at the Flopper;
his lips moving without sound, his body trembling with emotional
excitement. Still once again the Flopper's eyes swept the line of men
and women and children, fast reaching toward a common ungovernable
hysteria--and then he turned with an unbalanced, impotent, broken
movement, flung out his good arm toward the Patriarch in piteous
supplication, and, jerking himself forward, went on.

Slowly, very slowly at first, he resumed his way, crawling it seemed by
no more than a painful inch on inch, in mortal pain, in mortal agony and
struggle--then gradually his movements began to quicken, as though
growing upon him were a mad, elated haste that he could not
control--quicker and quicker he went, pitching and lurching wildly; from
a pace that was beyond him.

A strange, low, moaning sound rose from behind him, fluttering,
inarticulate, that voiceless utterance that seeks to find some vent for
human emotion when human emotion sweeps with mighty surge to engulf the
soul. It rose and died away and rose again--and died away--and children
began to whimper with a fear and terror that they did not understand,
and seeking solace in their elders' faces found added cause for fear
instead.

Nearer to that saintly figure who stood so calm, so quiet, the massive
white-locked head still turned a little in that curious listening
attitude, beside whom, close drawn now, was that white-clad girlish
form, whose eyes were lowered, whose sweet face seemed to hold a heaven
of pity and infinite compassion, upon whose lips there was a smile of
divine tenderness, drew that piteous mockery of the image of a man,
whose every movement appeared one of agony beyond human power to
endure--and the agony found echo in the watchers' souls, and a low,
muffled groan as of men in pain and hurt, ran tremulously along the
line.

Still nearer to the Patriarch drew the Flopper. More heart-rending was
his every movement, for with his quickened pace he sought to move
without the aid of the only member that was as other men's, his left
hand and arm that, in pleading, yearning supplication, was stretched out
before him to the Patriarch.

The extreme ends of the long line of watchers curled a little inward,
almost imperceptibly, a half step taken without volition. The crippled
boy, swaying upon his crutch, his lips parted, trembling in every limb,
edged forward hesitantly, fearfully, now a foot, now another, now the
bare space of a single inch. And now down the entire length of the line
from end to end that wavering, rocking movement in swaying, pregnant
unison grew stronger--men knew not what they did--it seemed the very air
they breathed must smother them--and, in that dull, weird, lingering
note, rose again the sound of moaning that seemed to beat in consonance
with the distant mournful rhythm of the endless beat of surf on shore.

Women clutched at their breasts now; men's knuckles went white beneath
the tight-drawn skin; the children drew behind their mothers' skirts
and, terror-stricken, cried aloud. Surcharged, on the edge, the bare and
ragged edge of frenzy now was every man and woman in the crowd. It was a
sight, a spectacle that racked them in every fibre of their beings, that
stirred them to pity, to hope, to fear, until the awful misery of this
blighted and crawling thing was their own in its every twitch of
agony--that struck them with a terror, the greater because it was
indefinable, a prescience, a reaching out beyond human realm, the
invoking of a supernal power--the thought of which very power, once
loosed, chilled them with panic-dread.

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