Part 13

At once the entertainment began. A lank, harshfaced, muscular man whom Professor Gray introduced as his assistant, seated himself at the piano, and struck a chord, whereupon the Professor, in a powerful voice, sang what he termed the “Hymn of Healing,” inviting the audience to “assist” in the chorus, which gem of poesy ran as follows:—

“Ye shall be healed! Ye shall be healed! Trust in the gospel advice. Cured by the herbs of the wood and the field; Healed without money or price.”

“Some poetic license in that last line,” murmured Clyde to his companion.

“The next portion of our programme,” announced the Great Gray Benefactor, “will be corroborative readings from the Good Book.” And he proceeded to deliver in oratorical style sundry Bible quotations so patched together and garbled as to ascribe, inferentially, miraculous powers to the Gospel Herbs. Then came the lecture proper, which was merely an amplification of the “Bugle” advertisement, interspersed with almanac funny stories and old jokes.

“And now, before our demonstration,” concluded Professor Graham Gray, “if there is any here seeking enlightenment or help, let him rise. This is your meeting, dear friends, as much as mine; free to your voices and your needs, as well as to your welcome presence here. I court inquiry and fair investigation. Any questions? If not, we—”

“One moment!” The whole assemblage turned, as on a single pivot, to the side aisle where Dr. Strong had risen and now stood, tall, straight, and composed, waiting for silence.

“Our friend on the right has the floor,” said the Professor suavely.

“You state that this God-given secret remedy was imparted to you for the relief of human misery?” asked Dr. Strong.

“Thousands of grateful patients attest it, my friend.”

“Then, with human beings suffering and dying all about you, why do you continue to profit by keeping it secret?”

Down sat the questioner. A murmur rose and ran, as the logic of the question struck home. But the quack had his answer pat.

“Does not the Good Book say that the laborer is worthy of his hire? Do your regular physicians, of whom I understand you are one, treat cases for nothing? Ah,” he went on, outstretching his hands to the audience with a gesture of appeal, “the injustice which I have suffered from the jealousy and envy of the medical profession! Never do I enter a town without curing many unfortunates that the regular doctors have given up as hopeless. Hence the violence of their attacks upon me. But I forgive them their prejudice, as I pity their ignorance.”

Some applause followed the enunciation of this noble sentiment.

“We have with us to-night,” pursued the speaker, quick to catch the veering sentiment, “a number of these marvelous cures. You shall hear from the very mouths of the saved ones testimony beyond cavil. I will call first on Mrs. Amanda Gryce, wife of Mr. Stanley Gryce, the well and favorably known laundryman. Speak up clearly, Mrs. Gryce, and tell your story.”

“It’s two years now that I been doctorin’,” said the lady thus adjured, in a fluttering voice. “I doctored with a allopathic physician here, an’ with a homypath over to Roxton, an’ with a osty-path down to Worthington, an’ with Peruny in betwixt, an’ they didn’t any of ‘em do me no good till I tried Professor Gray. He seen how I felt without askin’ me a question. He just pulled down my eyelid an’ looked at it. ‘You’re all run down; gone!’ says he. An’ thet’s jest what I was. So he treated me with his herb medicine an’ I feel like a new woman. An’ I give Professor Graham Gray the credit an’ the thanks of a saved woman.”

“Not to mention seven dollars an’ a half,” supplemented a mournful drawl from the audience.

“You hush, Stan Gryce!” cried the healed one, shrill above the laughter of the ribald. “Would you begrutch a few mizzable dollars for your poor, sufferin’ wife’s health?”

An alarmed child of ten was next led forward and recited in sing-song measure:—

“I—had—the—fits—for—most—three— years—and—I—was—cured—by Gospel—Herbs—and—I—have—come—here—to—say—God—bless—my—dear benefactor—Professor—Graham—Gray,”—and sat down hard at the last word, whereupon a tenor squeak in the far gallery took up the refrain:

“You’d scarcex peckwon of my yage To speakin public on the stage.”

Again there was a surge of mirth, and the lecturer frowned with concern. But he quickly covered whatever misgivings he might have had by bringing forward other “testimonies”: old Miss Smithson whose nervousness had been quite dispelled by two doses of the herbs; Auntie Thomas (colored) whose “misery” had vanished before the wonder-working treatment; and the Widow Carlin, whose boy had been “spittin’ blood like as if he was churchyard doomed,” but hadn’t had a bad coughing spell since taking the panacea. And all this time Dr. Strong sat quiet in his seat, with a face of darkening sternness.

“You have heard your fellow-citizens,” the lecturer took up his theme again, “testify to the efficacy of my methods. And you see on this rostrum with me that grand and good old man, the worthy pastor of so many of you, my dear and honored friend—I feel that I may call him friend, since I have his approval of my humble labors—the Reverend Doctor Huddleston. You see also here, lending the support of his valued presence, the Honorable Silas Harris, whom you have twice honored by sending him to the state legislature. Their presence is the proudest testimonial to my professional character. In Mr. Harris’s fearless and independent journal you have read the sworn evidence of those who have been cured by my Godgiven remedies; evidence which is beyond challenge—”

“I challenge it.”

Dr. Strong, who had been hopefully awaiting some such opening, was on his feet again.

“You have had your say!” cried Professor Gray, menacing him with a shaking hand. “These people don’t want to hear you. They understand your motives. You can’t run this meeting.”

The gesture was a signal. The raw-boned accompanist, whose secondary function was that of bouncer, made a quick advance from the rear, reached for the unsuspicious Health Master—and recoiled from the impact of Mr. Thomas Clyde’s solid shoulder so sharply that only the side wall checked his subsidence.

“Better stay out of harm’s way, my friend,” suggested Clyde amiably.

Immediately the hall was in an uproar. The more timid of the women were making for the exits, when a high, shrill voice, calling for order strenuously, quelled the racket, and a very fat man waddled down the middle aisle, to be greeted by cries of “Here’s the Mayor.” Several excited volunteers explained the situation to him from as many different points of view, while Professor Graham Gray bellowed his appeal from the platform.

“All I want is fair play. They’re trying to break up my meeting.”

“Not at all,” returned Dr. Strong’s calm voice. “I’m more than anxious to have it continue.”

With a happy inspiration, Mr. Clyde jumped up on his bench.

“I move Mayor Allen take the chair!” he shouted. “Professor Gray says that he courts fair investigation. Let’s give it to him, in order.”

A shout of acclaim greeted this suggestion. Bairdstown’s Suffering Womanhood and Bored Manhood was getting more out of a free admission than it had ever had in its life before. Ponderously the obese Mayor hoisted his weight up the steps and shook hands with the reluctant lecturer. He then invited Dr. Strong to come to the platform.

“This is my meeting!” protested the Great Gray Benefactor. “I hired this hall and paid good money for it.”

“You said it was our meeting as much as yours!” roared an insurgent from the crowd, and a chorus of substantiation followed.

“Ten minutes will be all that I want,” announced Dr. Strong as he took a chair next the Mayor.

“That’s fair!” shrilled the Chairman. “On the Professor’s own invitation.” In a tone lowered to the alarmed quack’s ear, he added: “Of course, you can back out if you want to. But I’d advise you to do it quick if you’re going to do it at all. This is a queer-tempered town.”

So significant was his tone that the other judged advance to be safer than retreat. Therefore, summoning all his assurance, he sought, in an impassioned speech, to win back his hearers. He was a natural orator, and, when he reached his peroration, he had a large part of his audience with him again. In the flush of renewed confidence he made a grave tactical error, just when he should have closed.

“Let this hireling of the Doctors’ Trust, the trust that would strangle all honest competition, answer these if he can!” he shouted, shaking the page of testimonials before his adversary’s face. “Let him confute the evidence of these good and honorable women who have appeared here to-night; women who have no selfish aims to subserve. Let him impugn the motives of the reverend clergyman and of the honored statesman who sit here with me. Let him do this, or let him shrink from this hall in the shame and dishonor which he seeks to heap upon one whose sole ambition it is to relieve suffering and banish pain and death.”

There was hearty applause as the speaker sat down and Dr. Strong arose to face a gathering now turned for the most part hostile. He wasted no time in introduction or argument. “Mr. Chairman,” said he, “Professor Gray rests his case on his testimonials. With Mr. Clyde I have investigated a number of them, and will give you my results. Here are half a dozen testimonials to the value of one of his nostrums, the Benefaction Pills, from women who have been cured, so they state, of diseases ranging from eczema through indigestion to consumption. All, please note, by the same wonderful medicine. And here,” he drew a small box from his pocket, “is a sample of the medicine. I have just had it analyzed. What do you suppose they are? Sugar! Just plain sugar and nothing else.” Professor Gray leaped to his feet. “You don’t deny the cures!” he thundered.

“I don’t deny that these people are well to-day. And I don’t deny that the testimonials from them are genuine, as documents. But your sugar pills had no more to do with the cure than so much moonshine. Listen, you people! Here is the core and secret of quackery:

“All diseases tend to cure themselves, through the natural resistance of the body. But for that we should all be dead. This man, or some other of his kind, comes along with his promises and pills, and when the patient recovers from the disease in the natural course of events, he claims the credit. Meantime, he is selling sugar at about one hundred dollars per pound.”

“Sugar,” said the quack, quick-wittedly. “But what kind of sugar? This sugar, as he calls it, is crystal precipitated from the extract of these healing herbs. No chemist can determine its properties by any analysis.”

“Very well turned,” said Dr. Strong, with a smile. “I can’t immediately disprove that, though I could with time. But, whatever the case with his sugar, any chemist can analyze this.” He held up a small bottle, half filled with a red-brown liquid. “This is the Extract of Gospel Herbs. Now, let us see what this does.”

He referred to his copy of the “Bugle,” containing the testimonials. “Here is Mrs. Sarah Jenkins, of the neighboring town of Maresco, where Professor Gray lectured a year ago, cured of Bright’s disease and dropsy; Miss Allie Wheat, of Weedsport, cured of cancer of the stomach; and Mrs. Howard Cleary, of Roxton, wholly relieved of nervous breakdown and insomnia. All genuine testimonials. Mr. Clyde and I have traced them.”

Professor Gray raised his head with a flash of triumph. “You see!” he cried. “He has to admit the genuineness of my testimonials!”

“Of your testimonials; yes. But what about your cures? Mrs. Jenkins has, as she said, ceased to suffer from her ills. She died of Bright’s disease and dropsy three months after Professor Gray cured her of them. Miss Wheat, whose cancer was purely imaginary, is now a hopeless wreck, in a sanitarium whither the Gospel Herbs drove her. Mrs. Cleary—but let me read what she testified to. Here it is in the paper with a picture of the Cleary home:—”

_Dear Professor Gray: You have indeed been a benefactor to me. Before our baby was born my husband and I were the happiest of couples. Then I became a nervous wreck. I couldn’t sleep. I was cross and irritable. My nerves seemed all on fire. Your first treatment worked wonders. I slept like a log. Since then I have not been without Gospel Herbs in the house, and I am a well woman._

(Signed) Mrs. Howard Cleary.

“That was a year ago,” continued Dr. Strong. “Yesterday we visited the Cleary home. We found a broken husband and a deserted baby. The young wife we traced to Worthington, where we discovered her—well, I won’t name to this audience the sort of place we found her in.

“But so far as there can be a hell on this earth, she had descended into it, and this,” he held the vial high to view, “_this_ sent her there.” His fingers opened; there was a crisp little crash of glass, and the red-brown liquid crept and spread along the floor, like blood.

“Morphine,” said Dr. Strong. “Morphine, which enslaves the body and destroys the soul. There are your Gospel Herbs!”

A murmur rose, and deepened into a growl. The Great Gray Benefactor, his face livid, sprang forward.

“Lies!” he shouted. “All lies! Where’s his proof? What’s he got to show? Nothing but his own say-so. If there’s a law in the land, I’ll make him sweat for this. Mr. Huddleston, I appeal to you for justice.”

“We shall be glad to hear from the Reverend Mr. Huddleston,” mildly suggested the chairman, who was evincing an enjoyment of the proceedings quite puzzling to Dr. Strong.

The old clergyman got slowly to his feet. His mild, weak face was troubled. “Let us bear and forbear,” he pleaded in a tremulous voice. “I cannot believe these charges against our good friend, Professor Gray. I am sure that he is a good and worthy man. He has given most liberally to the church. I am informed that he is a member of his home church in good and regular standing, and I find in the editorial columns of the ‘Church Pillar’ a warm encomium upon his beneficent work, advising all to try his remedies. Surely our friend, Dr. Strong, has been led astray by mistaken zeal.

“Only yesterday two members of my congregation, most estimable ladies, called to see me and told me how they had benefited by a visit just made to Professor Gray. He had treated them with his new Gospel Elixir, of which he has spoken to me. There was evidence of its efficacy in their very bearing and demeanor—”

“I should say there was! _And_ in their breath. Did you smell it?”

The interruption came in a very clear, positive, and distinct contralto.

“Great Grimes’s grass-green ghost!” exclaimed Mr. Thomas Clyde, quite audibly amidst the startled hush. “Grandma Sharpless is among those present!”

“I—I—I—I do not think,” began the clergyman, aghast, “that the matter occurred to me.”

“Because, if _you_ didn’t, _I_ did,” continued the voice composedly. “They reeked of liquor.”

The tension to which the gathering had been strung abruptly loosened in mirth.

“Mrs. Sharpless will please take the platform,” invited the Mayor-chairman.

“No, I’ll do my talking from here.” The old lady stood up, a straight, solid, uncompromising figure, in the center of the floor. “I met those two ladies in the parsonage hall,” she explained. “They were coming out as I was going in. They stopped to talk to me. They both talked at once. I wouldn’t want to say that they were—well—exactly—”

“Spifflicated,” suggested a helpful voice from the far rear.

“Spifflicated; thank you,” accepted the speaker. “But they certainly were—”

“Lit up,” volunteered another first-aid to the hesitant.

“Yes, lit up. One of them loaned me her bottle. If I’m any judge of bad whiskey, that was it.”

An appreciative roar from the house testified to the fact that Mrs. Sharpless had her audience in hand.

“As for you women on the stage,” she pursued, rising to her topic, “I know what’s wrong with you.‘Mandy Gryce, if you’d tend more to your house and less to your symptoms, you wouldn’t be flitting from allopathic bud to homoeopathic flower like a bumblebee with the stomach-ache.” (“Hear, hear!” from Mr. Gryce.) “Lizzie Tompy, your fits are nine tenths temper. I’d cure you of ‘em without morphine. Miss Smithson, if you’d quit strong green tea, three times a day, those nerves of yours would give you a fairer chance—and your neighbors, too.” (Tearful sniffs from Miss Smithson.)

“Auntie Thomas, you wait and see what your rheumatism says to you to-morrow, when the dope has died out of your system. Susan Carlin, you ought to be home this minute, looking after your sick boy, instead of on a stage, in your best bib and tucker, giving testimonials to you-don’t-know-what-all poison.

“Bairdstown’s Suffering Womanhood!” exclaimed the vigorous old lady, her color rising with her voice. “Go home! Go home, you poor, self-coddling fussybuddies, to your washboards and your sewing-machines and forget your imaginary symptoms.

“There!” she drew a long breath, looking about over the group of wilting testimonial-givers. “That’s the first speech I have ever made, and I guess it’ll be the last. But before I stop, I’ve got a word to say to you, Professor Graham Gray. Bless us! Where’s the man gone?”

“Professor Gray,” announced the chairman with a twinkle in his voice, “has retired to obtain fresh evidence. At least, that is what he _said_ he had gone for.”

From the main floor came a hoarse suggestion which had the words “tar and feathers” in it. It was cut short by a metallic shriek from without, followed by a heavy rumbling.

“Something seems to tell me,” said the fat Mayor solemnly, “that the 9.30 express, which just whistled for the crossing, is the heavier by about two hundred pounds of Great Gray Benefactor clinging to the rear platform, and happy to be there.”

“And your money back if not benefited,” piped a reedy voice from the front, whereupon there was another roar.

“The bright particular star of these proceedings having left, is there anything else to come before the meeting?” inquired the chairman.

“I’d like to have one more word,” said Dr. Strong. “Friends, as one quack is, all quacks are. They differ only in method and degree. Every one of them plays a game with stacked cards, in which you are his victims, and Death is his partner. And the puller-in for this game is the press.

“You have heard to-night how a good and wellmeaning clergyman has been made stool-pigeon for this murderous charlatan, through the lying of a religious—God save the mark!—weekly. That publication is beyond our reach. But there is one here at home which did the quack’s work for him, and took his money for doing it. I suggest that the Honorable Silas Harris explain!”

“I’m running my paper as a business proposition,” growled the baited editor and owner of the ‘Bugle,’ “and I’m running it to suit myself and this community.”

“You’re running it to suit the crooked and cruel advertisers who prey on this community,” retorted the other. “And you’ve served them further in the legislature, where you voted to kill the patent-medicine bill, last session, in protection of your own profits. Good profits, too. One third of all your advertising is medical quackery which takes good money out of this town by sheer swindling; money which ought to stay in town and be spent on the legitimate local products advertised in your paper. If I were a local advertiser, I’d want to know why.”

“If that’s the case,” remarked Mr. Stanley Gryce, quick to catch the point, “I guess you owe my family seven dollars an’ a half, Silas, and till it’s paid up you can just drop my laundry announcement out of your columns.”

“I guess I’ll stay out for a spell, too,” supplemented Mr. Corson, the hay and feed man. “For a week, my ad’s been swamped by Swamp Root so deep you can’t see it.”

“While you’re about it,” added a third, “leave me out. I’m kinder sick of appearin’ between a poisonous headache powder and a consumption dope. Folks’ll be accusin’ me of seekin’ trade untimely.” This was greeted with a whoop, for the speaker was the local undertaker.

“We’ve got a league for Clean Advertising in Worthington,” announced Mr. Clyde. “Why not organize something of the kind here?”

“Help!” shouted the Honorable Silas, throwing up his hands. “Don’t shoot! I holler ‘Enough!’ As soon as the contracts are out, I’ll quit. There’s no money in patent-medicine advertising any more for the small paper, anyway.”

“Well, we’ve done our evening’s chores, I reckon,” remarked the chairman. “A motion to adjourn will now be in order.”

“Move we adjourn with the chorus of the ‘Hymn of Healing,’” piped the wag with the reedy voice, and the audience filed out, uproariously and profanely singing:—

“Ye shall be healed! Ye shall be healed! Trust in the gospel advice. Cured by the herbs of the wood and the field; Healed without money or price.”

“Well, young man,” said Grandma Sharpless, coming forward to join the Health Master, “you certainly carried out your programme.”

“I?” said Dr. Strong, affectionately tucking the old lady’s arm under his. “To you the honors of war. I only squelched a quack. You taught Bairds-town’s self-coddling womanhood a lesson that will go down the generations.”

“What I want to know,” said the Mayor, advancing to shake hands with Mrs. Sharpless, “is this: what’s a fussybuddy?”

“A fussybuddy,” instructed Grandma Sharpless wisely, “is a woman who catches a stomach-ache from a patent-medicine almanac. What I want to know, Tom Allen, is what you had against the man. I seemed to get an inkling that you didn’t exactly like him.”

“He’s forgotten me,” chuckled the Mayor, “but I haven’t forgotten him. Fifteen years ago he came along here horse-doctoring and poisoned a perfectly good mare for me. He won’t try to poison this town again in a hurry. You finished him, Mrs. Sharpless, you and Dr. Strong.”

“What _I_ want to know,” said the Health Master, “is how poor old Mr. Huddleston feels about that contribution, now.”

A month later he found out. Traveling by trolley one evening, he felt a hand on his shoulder, and turned to face Professor Graham Gray.

“No hard feelings, I hope,” said the quack with superb urbanity. “All in the way of business, I take it. I’d have done the same to you, if you’d come butting in on my trade. Say, but that old lady was a Tartar! She cooked my goose in Bairdstown. For all that, I got an unsolicited testimonial from there two weeks ago that’s a wonder. Anonymous, too. Not a word of writing with it to tell who the grateful patient might be.”

“What was it?” asked Dr. Strong with polite interest.

“A twenty-dollar bill. Now, _what_ do you think of that?”

When Dr. Strong spoke again—and the Great Gray Benefactor has always regarded this as the most inconsequential reply he ever received to a plain question—it was after a long and thoughtful pause.

“I think,” said he with conviction, “that I’ll start in going to church again, next Sunday.”

X. THE HOUSE THAT CAUGHT COLD

“Can you cure a cold?” asked Grandma Sharpless.

A flare from the soft-coal fire flickered across the library, revealing a smile on the Health Master’s face.

“Am I a millionaire?” he countered.

“Not from your salary as Chinese physician to the Clydes,” laughed the head of that family.

“If I could cure a cold, I should be, easily, more than that. I’d be the foremost medical discoverer of the day.”

“Then you can’t cure a cold,” pursued Mrs. Sharpless.

“What _is_ a cold?” countered the Health Master in that insinuating tone of voice which he employed to provoke the old lady into one of those frequent verbal encounters so thoroughly enjoyed by both of them.

“An ordinary common cold in the head. You know what I mean perfectly well, young man. The kind you catch by getting into drafts.”

“Oh, _that!_ Well, you see, there’s no such thing.”