"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,