Dorothy and the four boys took it in turn to sit with the tramp in the caravan. He was a wretched old man, worn out by poverty, whose rags were only held together by pieces of string. In the middle of his bushy hair and unkempt beard his eyes, however, still had a certain glow, and when Dorothy questioned him about the life he led, he confounded her by saying:
"One mustn't complain. My father, who was a traveling knife-grinder always said to me: 'Hyacinth—that's my name—Hyacinth, one isn't miserable while one's brave: Fortune is in the firm heart.'"
Dorothy concealed her amazement and said:
"That's not a weighty legacy. Did he only leave you this secret?"
"Yes," said the tramp quite simply. "That and a piece of advice: to go on the 12th of July every year, and wait in front of the church of Roche-Périac for somebody who will give me hundreds and thousands. I go there every year. I've never received anything but pennies. All the same, it keeps one going, that idea does. I shall be there to-morrow, as I was last year ... and as I shall be next."
The old man fell back upon his own thoughts. Dorothy said no more. But an hour later she offered the shelter of the box to the woman and the club-footed child, whom they had at last overtaken. And questioning this woman, she learnt that she was a factory hand from Paris who was going to the church of Roche-Périac that her child's foot might be healed.
"In my family," said the woman, "in my father's time and my grandfather's too, one always did the same thing when a child was ill, one took it on the 12th of July into the chapel of Saint Fortunat at Roche-Périac. It's a certain cure."
So, by these two other channels, the legend had passed to this woman of the people and this tramp, but a deformed legend, of which there only remained a few shreds of the truth: the church took the place of the château, Saint Fortunat of the fortune. Only the day of the month mattered; there was no question of the year. There was no mention at all of the medal. And each was making a pilgrimage towards the place from which so many families had looked for miraculous aid.
That evening the caravan reached the village, and at once Dorothy obtained information about the Château de la Roche-Périac. The only château of that name that was known was some ruins six miles further on situated on the shore of the ocean on a small peninsula.
"We'll sleep here," said Dorothy, "and we'll start early in the morning."