Chesterton advanced and asked if he could be of service. The priest
shook his head. The child, he said, was the only son of the landlord,
and much beloved by him, and by all the village. He was now in the third
week of typhoid fever and the period of hemorrhages. Unless they could
be checked, the boy would die, and the priest, who for many miles of
mountain and forest was also the only doctor, had exhausted his store of
simple medicines.

"Nothing can stop the hemorrhage," he protested wearily, "but the
strongest of drugs. And I have nothing!"

Chesterton bethought him of the medicine case Miss Armitage had forced
upon him. "I have given opium to the men for dysentery," he said. "Would
opium help you?"

The priest sprang at him and pushed him out of the door and toward the
saddle-bags.

"My children," he cried, to the silent group in the plaza, "God has sent
a miracle!"

After an hour at the bedside the priest said, "He will live," and
knelt, and the mother of the boy and the villagers knelt with him. When
Chesterton raised his eyes, he found that the landlord, who had been
silently watching while the two men struggled with death for the life
of his son, had disappeared. But he heard, leaving the village along the
trail to Mayaguez, the sudden clatter of a pony's hoofs. It moved like a
thing driven with fear.

The priest strode out into the moonlight. In the recovery of the child