Page:Frank Packard - The Miracle Man.djvu/122

 with them," coughed Pale Face Harry behind his hand.

"I guess I'll get acquainted," said Madison. "Circulate, Harry, and cough your head off—don't hide your light under a bushel—circulate." And Madison fell back to scrape acquaintance with the man of millions.

Close-packed upon the road, the procession spread out for a hundred yards behind the Flopper—bare-footed children; women in multi-colored gingham and calico; men in the uncouth dress of the fields, the uncouthness accentuated by the sprinkling of more pretentious clothing worn by those who had come from the train. And slowly, very slowly, this conglomerate human cosmorama moved on, undulating queerly with the variant movements of its component parts, snail-like, for the Flopper's pace was slow—as strange a spectacle, perhaps, as the human eye had ever witnessed, something of grimness, something of humor, something of awe, something of fear exuding from it—it seemed to contain within itself the range, and to express, the gamut of all human emotion.

On the procession went—so slowly as to be almost sinister in its movement. And a strange sound rose from it and seemed to float and hover over it like a weird, invisible, acoustic canopy. Three hundred voices, men's, women's and children's, rose and fell, rose and fell—at first in a medley of scoffings, laughter, sullen murmurs, earnest dispute and children's prattle—a strange