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.