"Of course we do," said Mr. Higgins helplessly. "Couldn't feel no ways else."
Madison laid his hand suddenly, impressively, upon Mr. Higgins' shoulder and looked meaningly into Mr. Higgins' eyes--and into the eyes of the selectmen, the overseers of the poor, the general-store proprietor, and the school committee.
"Don't drive him over, then," he said significantly. "Don't any of the rest of you do it either--and tell everybody else not to. Make him _crawl_. If he's determined to go, let him get there by himself if he can, make him crawl--he'll never be able to do it."
"That's so," said Mr. Higgins, brightening, while the others nodded; then, dubiously: "But s'pose he _does_ get there--how be we goin' to stop him?"
"If he can get there by himself you can't stop him," said Madison seriously. "You can't do anything like that. To use force would be carrying things too far, and would only place the Patriarch in a worse light. If this fellow--what's his name?--Coogan?--can crawl there, let him--that's his own business. None of _us_ are encouraging him, the Patriarch didn't ask him to come, and no one has a right to expect miracles--so it can't hurt the Patriarch seriously under those conditions. Besides, if this Coogan has got faith enough to crawl that mile, who knows what might happen--make him crawl."
Mr. Higgins, with a grim nod, headed a determined exodus from the hotel office--and Madison strolled out onto the veranda.
Needley was in a furor. The news spread like an oil-fed conflagration. The farmers left their work in the fields and hurried into the village; from the houses and cottages came the women and children to cluster around the Congress Hotel; from the station, scarcely of less interest to the inhabitants than the Flopper himself, straggled in those curious enough to have left the train, nearly a dozen of them--and amongst them Pale Face Harry coughed, as he trudged laboriously along.
Larger and larger grew the circle around the Flopper, filling and blocking the road, overflowing into front yards, and massing on the little lawn of the hotel clear up to the veranda--until fields and houses were deserted, and to the last inhabitant Needley was there.
Upon the ground squatted the Flopper, his eyes sweeping the ring of faces that was like a wall around him--the grinning faces of his fellow passengers from the train; the stony, concerned and rather sullen faces of the men of Needley; the anxious, excited faces of the women; the bewildered, curious and somewhat frightened faces of the children, who pushed and shoved their elders for better vantage ground.