ago—­nobody 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 shore 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 nobody 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 companionship 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 association 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