Having observed the habits of the game, David now chose a favorable position to study those of the hunter.  He watched with an almost breathless interest every expression upon that sinister face and listened with a boundless interest to every word that fell from those treacherous lips.

He was not long in justifying the quack’s honest criticism of his own oratory.  His voice lacked the vibrant tones of a musical instrument and his rhetoric that fluency, without which the highest effects of eloquence can never be attained.  By speaking very slowly and deliberately he avoided stammering, but this always acted like a dragging anchor upon the movement of his thought.  These were radical defects, but in every other respect he was a consummate artist.  He arrested the attention of his hearers with an inimitable skill and held it with an irresistible power.

His piercing eye noted every expression on the faces of his hearers, and seemed to read the inmost secrets of their hearts.  He perceived the slightest inclination to purchase, and was as keen to see a hand steal towards a pocket-book as a cat to see a mouse steal out of its hole.

He coaxed, he wheedled, he bantered, he abused,—­he even threatened.  He fulfilled his promise to the letter, “to make the well men think that they were sick,” and many a stalwart frontiersman whose body was as sound as an ox, began to be conscious of racking pains.

Nor were those legitimate arts of oratory the only ones which this arch-knave practiced.

“I gave you two dollars, and you only gave me change for one,” cried a thin-faced, stoop-shouldered, helpless-looking fellow, who had just purchased a bottle of the “Balm of the Blessed Islands.”

With lightning-like legerdemain the quack had shuffled this bill to the bottom of his pile, and lifting up the one that lay on top, exposed it to the view of his audience.

“That’s a lie!” he said, in his slow, impressive manner.  “There is always such a man as this in every crowd.  Some one is always trying to take advantage of those who, like myself, are living for the public good.  Gentlemen, you saw me lay the b-b-bill he gave me down upon the top!  Here it is; judge for yourselves.  That is a bad man!  Beware of him!”

The bold effrontery of the quack silenced the timid customer, who could only blush and look confused.  His blushes and confusion condemned him and the crowd hustled him away from the wagon.  They believed him guilty and he half believed it of himself.

David, who had seen the bill and knew the victim’s innocence but not the doctor’s fraud, pressed forward to defend him.  The quack stopped and silenced him with an inimitable wink, and then instantly and with consummate art diverted his auditors with a series of droll stories which he always reserved for emergencies like this.  They were old and thread-bare, but this was the reason he chose them.  He had one for every circumstance and occasion.