ow, 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