"Merciful daylights!" he breathed heavily. "Now what in the land's sakes be it all about?" His eyes, following the hurrying passengers, fixed on the twisted shape of the Flopper, being helped to the platform from the private car.
"Three cheers for Coogan!" yelled some excitable passenger.
The cheers were given with a will.
"Good luck to you, Coogan!" shouted another—and
the crowd took it up in chorus: "Good luck to you, Coogan!"
"Coogan!"—Mr. Higgins' face paled, and he took a firmer grip on his whiskers. "Now if you ain't gone an' put your fool foot in it, Hiram Higgins," he said miserably. "If that there's the fellow that you writ to, you've just laid out to make a plumb fool of the Patriarch, 'cause I reckon the Almighty knew His own mind when He made a critter like that, an' didn't calc'late to have His work upsot much this side of the grave—not even by the Patriarch."
—IX—
THE PILGRIMAGE
Faith is an inheritance common to the human race; and the human race in its daily life, in its daily dealings, man to man, could not go on without it—but faith is a matter of degree. Faith, in the abstract, the element of it, is inborn in every soul; and while dormant, until put to a crucial test along any given line, is boundless and unlimited—a sort of tacitly accepted, existing state, unquestioned. Faith in many is a sturdy, virile thing—to a certain point. It is the fire that proves.