Page:Richard Marsh--The joss, a reversion.djvu/163

Rh Four or five of those in the front rank were shoved upon the rest. The joke expanded. Presently the “Freak” was at the bottom of a writhing heap.

Perceiving that the jest was likely to become a serious one for the point of it, I forced my way into the centre of the crowd.

“Stand back!” I cried. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves! You ought to pity the map instead of making sport of him. He is as God made him; it is not his fault that he is not like you.”

Nor, I felt as I looked at the faces which surrounded me, was it, after all, his serious misfortune either. Unless their looks belied them, in a moral, mental, and physical sense, the majority of them were “freaks,” if the word had any meaning. They gave way, however, to let me pass; it seemed that their temper was thoughtless rather than cruel. Soon I had extricated the wretched creature from his ignominious, and even perilous, position. Hailing a passing four-wheeler I put him into it, I slipped some money into the driver's hand, and bidding him take his fare to Olympia, the man drove off. The crowd booed a little, and then stared at me. Then, seeing that I paid them no sort of heed, they were so good as to suffer me to pursue my way unmolested and alone.

It was only after I had gone some little distance that I realised that I knew nothing whatever about the creature I had put into the cab, I had only the clay-piped gentleman’s word for the fact that he, she, or it was a freak at all. The creature—I call it creature for lack of more precise knowledge as to what he, she, or it, really was—was so enveloped in an odd-shaped cloak of some dark brown material, that, practically, so far as I had been able to see, nothing of it was visible. For all that I could tell the creature beneath the cloak might not have been human. There was certainly nothing to show—except the way in which it was shrouded, and that might have