Helena watched him in silence—a little bitterly. That quick, clever, cunning brain of his was at work again—scheming—scheming—always scheming—and Naida Thornton was dead.
"I'll tell you," said Madison, speaking again as abruptly as he had stopped. "It's simple enough. There's a westbound train due in an hour or so—we'll couple the private car onto that and send it right along to Chicago. What the authorities don't know won't hurt them. There's no reason for anybody except Thornton to know what's happened till she gets there—I'll wire him. The main thing is that the car won't be here in the morning, and that'll take a little of the intimate touch of Needley off. It might well have happened on her way home—journey too much for her—left too soon—see? Thornton'll see it in the right light because he's got fifty thousand dollars worth of faith in what's going on here—get that? He won't want to harm
the 'cause.' There'll be some publicity of course, we can't help that—but it won't hurt much—and Thornton can gag a whole lot of it—he'd want to anyway for his own sake. Now then, kid, there's Sam over there—you pile into the wagon and go home, while I get busy—and don't you say a word about this, even to the Flopper."
And so Helena drove back to the Patriarch's cottage that night, a little silent figure in the back seat of the wagon—and her hands were locked tightly together in her lap—and to her, as she drove over the peaceful, moonlit road, and under the still, arched branches of the trees in the wood that hid the starlight, came again and again the words of one who had gone, who perhaps knew better now—"you are as God made you."
—XVI—
A FLY IN THE OINTMENT
The days passed. And with the days, morning, noon and night, they came by almost every train, the sick and suffering, the lame, the paralytics and the maimed—a steady influx by twos and threes and fours—from north over the Canadian boundary line, from the far west, and from the southernmost tip of the Florida coast. No longer on the company's schedule was Needley a flag station—it was a regular stop, and its passenger traffic returns were benign and pleasing things in the auditor's office. And it was an accustomed sight now, many times a day—what had once been a strange, rare spectacle—that slow procession wending its way from the station to the town, some carried, some limping upon crutches, all snatching at hope of life and health and happiness again. Needley, perforce, had become a vast boarding house, as it were—there were few homes indeed that did not harbor their quota of those who sought the "cure."
But there were others too who came—who were not sick—who had not faith—who came to laugh and peer and peek. Pleasure yachts dropped their anchors in the cove around the headland
from the Patriarch's cottage—and their dingeys brought women decked out de rigeur in middy blouses and sailor collars, and nattily attired gentlemen whose only claim to seamanship was the clothes, or rather, the costumes that they wore.