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.