le 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,
frowsy of dress, and a world removed from the thought of a morning bath.
It might be picturesque in a way--but it wasn't a way Madison liked.
Somehow, he'd have to jerk the old chap out of his rut and get him
rigged up a little more becomingly, before the trusting public, simple
as they were, were invited down to see the exhibit. Madison's dramatic
instinct, which was developed to a keen sense of what the public craved
for, rebelled against any _faux pas_ in the scenic effects. He fell to
designing a costume that would more appropriately expound the role.

"Got to give 'em something for their money," murmured John Garfield
Madison. "Some sort of long, flowing robe now, washed every day, sort of
Grecian effect with a rope girdle, bare feet and sandals--um-m--dunno
about the sandals--don't want to slop over, and besides"--Madison
grinned a little to himself--"he might kick!"

Still reflecting, but arrived at no conclusion other than first to size
up the Patriarch and see how best to handle him, Madison reached the end
of the wagon track--and halted.

It was a lit