"'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