was already half-way up her lane, running wildly. In her heart was room
for but one agonized thought. Would Lionel Hezekiah be drowned before
she reached him?

She opened the gate of the yard, and panted across it just as a tall,
grim-faced woman came around the corner of the house and stood rooted to
the ground in astonishment at the sight that met her eyes.

But Salome saw nobody. She flung herself against the hogshead and looked
in, sick with terror at what she might see. What she did see was Lionel
Hezekiah sitting on the bottom of the hogshead in water that came
only to his waist. He was looking rather dazed and bewildered, but was
apparently quite uninjured.

The yard was full of people, but nobody had as yet said a word; awe and
wonder held everybody in spellbound silence. Judith was the first to
speak. She pushed through the crowd to Salome. Her face was blanched
to a deadly whiteness; and her eyes, as Mrs. William Blair afterwards
declared, were enough to give a body the creeps.

"Salome," she said in a high, shrill, unnatural voice, "where is your
crutch?"

Salome came to herself at the question. For the first time, she realized
that she had walked, nay, run, all that distance from the church alone
and unaided. She turned pale, swayed, and would have fallen if Judith
had not caught her.

Old Dr. Blair came forward briskly.

"Carry her in," he said, "and don't all of you come crowding in, either.
She wants quiet and rest for a spell."

Most of the people obediently returned to the church, their sudden
loosened tongues clattering in voluble excitement. A few women assisted
Judith to carry Salome in and lay her on the kitchen lounge, followed
by the doctor and the dripping Lionel Hezekiah, whom the minister had
lifted out of the hogshead and to whom nobody now paid the slightest
attention.

Salome faltered out her story, and her hearers listened with varying
emotions.

"It's a miracle," said Sam Lawson in an awed voice.

Dr. Blair shrugged his shoulders. "There is no miracle about it," he
said bluntly. "It's all perfectly natural. The disease in the hip has
evidently been quite well for a long time; Nature does sometimes work
cures like that when she is let alone. The trouble was that the muscles
were paralyzed by long disuse. That paralysis was overcome by the force
of a strong and instinctive effort. Salome, get up and walk across the
kitchen."

Salome obeyed. She walked across the kitchen and