A twenty-dollar bill! Crisp, fresh, and golden, it rose monumentally from the basis of nickels, dimes, and quarters which made up the customary collection of the Bairdstown Memorial Church. Even the generosity of the Clyde family, who, whenever they spent a week-end at Mr. Clyde’s farm outside the little city, attended the Sunday services, looked meager and insignificant beside its yellow-backed splendor. Deacon Wilkes, passing the plate, gazed at it in fascination. Subsequent contributors surreptitiously touched it in depositing their own modest offerings, as if to make certain of its substance. It was even said at the Wednesday Sewing Circle that the Rev. Mr. Huddleston, from his eminence in the pulpit, had marked its colorful glint with an instant and benign eye and had changed the final hymn to one which specially celebrated the glory of giving.

In the Clyde pew also there was one who specially noted the donor, but with an expression far from benign. Dr. Strong’s appraising glance ranged over the plump and glossy perfection of the stranger, his symphonic grayness, beginning at his gray-suÈde-shod feet, one of which unobtrusively protruded into the aisle, verging upward through gray sock and trouser to gray frock coat, generously cut, and terminating at the sleek gray head. Even the tall hat which the man dandled on his knees was gray. Against this Quakerish color-scheme the wearer’s face stood out, large, pink, and heavy-jowled, lighted by restless brown eyes. His manner was at once important and reverent, and his “amen” a masterpiece of unction. No such impressive outlander had visited Bairdstown for many a moon.

After the service the visitor went forward to speak with Mr. Huddleston. At the same time Dr. Strong strolled up the aisle and contrived to pass the two so, as to obtain a face-to-face view of the stranger.

“At nine o’clock to-morrow, then, and I shall be delighted to see you,” the pastor was saying as Dr. Strong passed.

“Good-morning, Professor,” said Dr. Strong, with an accent on the final word as slight as the nod which accompanied it.

“Good-morning! Good-morning!” returned the other heartily. But his glance, as it followed the man who had accosted him, was puzzled and not wholly untroubled.

“Who is your munificent friend?” asked Mrs. Clyde, as the Health Master emerged from the church and joined her husband and herself in their car.

“When I last ran across him he called himself Professor Graham Gray, the Great Gray Benefactor,” replied Dr. Strong.

“Dresses the part, doesn’t he?” observed Mr. Clyde. “Where was it that you knew him?”

“On the Pacific Coast, five years ago. He was then ‘itinerating’—the quack term for traveling from place to place, picking up such practice as may be had by flamboyant advertising. Itinerating in eyes, as he would probably put it.”

“A wandering quack oculist?”

“Optician, rather, since he carried his own stock of glasses. In fact that’s where his profit came in. He advertised treatment free and charged two or three dollars for the glasses, special rates to schoolchildren. The scheme is an old one and a devilish. Half of the children in San Luis Obispo County, where I chanced upon his trail, were wearing his vision-twisters by the time he was through with them.”

“What kind of glasses were they?”

“Sometimes magnifying lenses. Mostly just plain window glass. Few children escaped him, for he would tell the parents that only prompt action could avert blindness.”

“At least the plain glass couldn’t hurt the children,” suggested Mrs. Clyde.

“Couldn’t it! It couldn’t fail to hurt them. Modify the sight of a delicate instrument like a child’s eye continuously by the most transparent of barriers, and it is bound to go wrong soon. The magnifying glasses are far worse. There are hundreds of children in that one locality alone who will carry the stigma of his quackery throughout their lives.”

“Do you think he is here with a view to practicing his amiable trade?” inquired Clyde.

“Only in part, if at all. I understand that he has changed his line.”

“How comes he by all that showy money, then?”

“By murder.”

The Clydes, accustomed to their physician’s hammerstroke turns of speech, took this under consideration.

“But he wasn’t committing murder in the church just now, I suppose,” insinuated Mrs. Clyde at length.

“Not directly. His immediate business there, I suspect, was bribery.”

“Of whom?”

“The minister.”

“Oh, come, Strong!” protested Mr. Clyde. “Mr. Huddleston isn’t an intellectual giant, I grant you; but he’s certainly a well-meaning and honorable old fellow.”

“Some cynical philosopher has remarked that wicked men have a talent for doing harm, but fools have a genius. Mr. Huddleston’s goodness and honesty, taken in connection with his hopeless ignorance of human nature, are just so much capital to hand for a scoundrel like this Gray.”

“What does he expect to get for his twenty-dol-lar bill?”

“First, a reputation for piety and generosity. Second, that reputation duly certified to by the leading minister of the town.”

“In other words, a testimonial.”

“Precisely. For home use, and cheap at twenty dollars. Preparatory to operating in a town, your itinerating quack bribes two people—if he can. First, the editor of the local paper; second, the pastor of the leading church. The editor usually takes the money with his eyes wide open; the minister with his eyes tight shut.”

“How can his eyes be shut to such a business?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

“Because so much dust has been thrown in them by the so-called religious journals.”

“Surely you don’t mean that religious journals exploit quackery in their pages!” cried Mrs. Clyde.

“They are the mainstay of the quack and patent medicine business,” declared the Health Master. “Leaving out the Christian Science papers, which, of course, don’t touch this dirty money, the religious press of all denominations, with a few honorable individual exceptions, sells out to any form of medical fraud which has a dollar to spend. Is it strange that the judgment of some of the clergy, who implicitly trust in their sectarian publications, becomes distorted? It’s an even chance that our Great Gray faker’s advertisement is in the religious weekly which lies on Mr. Huddleston’s study-table at this moment.”

Grandma Sharpless turned around from her seat in front, where she always ensconced herself so that, as she put it, she could see what was coming in time to jump. “I know it is,” she stated quietly. “For while I was waiting in the parsonage last week I picked up the ‘Church Pillar’ and saw it there.”

“Trust Grandma Sharpless’s eyes not to miss anything that comes within their range,” said Dr. Strong.

“Well, I missed the sense of that advertisement till just now,” retorted the old lady. “I’ve just remembered about this Graham Gray.”

“What about him?” asked the Health Master with eagerness, for Mrs. Sharpless’s memory was as reliable for retaining salient facts as her vision was for discerning them. “Do you know him?”

“Only by his works. Last year a traveling doctor of that name stopped over at Greenvale, twenty miles down the river, and gave some of his lectures to Suffering Womanhood, or some such folderol. He got hold of Sally Griffin, niece of our farmer here, while she was visiting there. Sally’s as sound as a pippin, except for an occasional spell of fool-in-the-head, and I guess no school of doctoring ever helps that common ailment much. Well, this Gray got her scared out of her wits with symptoms, and sold her twenty-five dollars’ worth of medicine to cure her of something or other she didn’t have. Cured!” sniffed the lively narrator. “If I hadn’t taken the stuff away from her and locked it up, I expect she’d be in the churchyard by now.”

“The whole philosophy of quackery explicated and punctured, by one who knows,” chuckled Dr. Strong.

“None of your palaver with me, young man!” returned the brisk old lady, who was devoted to the Health Master, and showed it by a policy of determined opposition of the letter and whole-hearted support of the spirit and deed, in all things. “Probably he knows as much as most of your regular doctors, at that!”

“At least he seems to know human nature. That’s the strong point of the charlatan. But have you got any of his medicine left?”

“Yes; I think I can lay my hands on what’s left of it. I remember that Sally boohooed like a baby, grown woman that she is, when I took it away from her.” Dr. Strong’s eyebrows went up sharply. “As soon as we get to the house I’ll look it up.”

On their arrival at the roomy old farmstead which Mr. Clyde had remodeled and modernized for what he called “an occasional three days of grace” from his business in the city of Worthington, Grandma Sharpless set about the search, and presently came to the living-room bearing in one hand a large bottle and in the other a newspaper.

“Since you’re interested in Professor Gray,” she said, “here’s what he says about himself in yesterday’s ‘Bairdstown Bugle.’ I do think,” she added, “that the Honorable Silas Harris might be in better business with his paper than publishing such truck as this. Listen to it.”

GOSPEL HERBS WILL CURE YOUR ILLS

Women of Bairdstown; Read your Bible! Revelation 22d chapter, 2d verse. God promises that “the Herbs of the field shall heal the nations.” In a vision from above, the holy secret has been revealed to me. Alone of all men, I can brew this miracle-working elixir.

“The blasphemous old slinkum!” Grandma Sharpless interrupted herself to say angrily. “He doesn’t even quote the Scriptures right!”

“Oh, blasphemy is a small matter for a rascal of his kind,” said the Health Master lightly. “Go on.”

She read on:—

Come to me, ye women who suffer, and I will give you relief. All those wasting and wearing ailments from which the tender sex suffers, vanish like mist before the healing, revivifying influence of Gospel Herbs. Supposed incurable diseases: Rheumatism, Dropsy, Diabetes and all kidney ills, Stomach Trouble, Scrofula, Blood Poison, even the dreaded scourge, Consumption, yield at once to this remedy.

Though my special message is to women, I will not withhold this boon from any suffering human. Come one and all, rich and poor, young and old, of either sex. Your money refunded if I do not cure you. Public meeting Monday and Tuesday evenings, at eight o’clock sharp in the Scatcherd Opera House; admission free to all. Private consultation at the Mallory Hotel, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Remember, I cure where the doctors fail; or no pay.

Prof. Graham Gray,

The Great Gray Benefactor.

Mrs. Sharpless held out for the general view the advertisement, which occupied, in huge type, two thirds of a page of the “Bugle.” The remainder of the page was taken up with testimonials to the marvelous effects of the Gospel Herbs. Most of the letters were from far-away towns, but there were a few from the general vicinity of Bairdsville.

Meantime Dr. Strong had been delicately tasting and smelling the contents of the bottle, which were thick and reddish.

“What do you make out is in it?” asked Clyde.

“Death—and a few worse things. Grandma Sharpless, you say that the girl cried for this after you took it from her?”

“Not only that; she wrote to the Professor for more. And when it came I smashed the bottle.”

“You ought to have the honorary degree of M.D. Well, it’s pretty plain, but to make sure I’ll send this to Worthington for an analysis.”

“So our friend, the gray wolf, is going to prowl in Bairdstown for the next three days!” Thomas Clyde began to rub his chin softly; then not so softly; and presently quite hard. His wife watched him with troubled eyes. When his hand came down to rest upon his knee, it was doubled into a very competent-looking fist. His face set in the expression which the newspapers of his own city had dubbed, after the tenement campaign of the year before, “Clyde’s fighting smile.”

“Oh, Tom!” broke out his wife, “what kind of trouble are you going to get into now?”

“Trouble?” repeated the head of the family, in well-simulated surprise. “Why, dear, I wasn’t even thinking of trouble—for myself. But I believe it is time for a little action. Let’s call this a household meeting” (this was one of the established methods of the Clyde clan) “and find out. As it isn’t a family affair, we won’t call in the children this time. Strong, what, if anything, are we going to do about this stranger in our midst? Are we going to let him take us in?”

“The question is,” said Dr. Strong quickly, “whether the Clyde family is willing to loan its subsidized physician temporarily to the city of Bairdstown.”

“On the Chinese plan,” supplemented Clyde.

“Certainly. On the Chinese plan of trying to save the community from a visitation instead of waiting to cure them of the incurable results of it.”

“By visitation I suppose you mean Professor Gray?” said Mrs. Sharpless.

“Exactly. I should rank him rather higher than an epidemic of scarlet fever, as an ally of damage and death.”

“I’ll vote ‘Yes,’” said Mrs. Clyde rather plaintively. “Only, I wish you two men didn’t have so much Irish in your temperament.”

“I scorn your insinuation,” replied her husband. “I’m the original dove of peace, but this Gray person ruffles my plumage. What do you say, Grandma?”

“Bairdstown is my own place, partly. I know the people and they know me and I won’t sit quiet and see ‘em put upon. I vote ‘Yes.’”

“Make it unanimous!” said Clyde. “What’s the first move of the army of relief? I’m in on this somewhere, Strong.”

“Contribute your car for a couple of days, then, and we’ll go out on a still hunt for the elusive clue and the shy and retiring evidence. In other words, we’ll scour the county, and look up some of these local testimonials which the Great Gray One gathered in last year, and now prints in the ‘Bugle.’”

“And I’ll stop in town and see Mr. Huddleston to-morrow,” said Mrs. Sharpless.

“You won’t get any results,” prophesied the Health Master. “But, anyway, get him to come to the Gray lecture on Tuesday evening. We’ll need him.”

During the ensuing two and a half days and two nights Mrs. Clyde had speech of her husband but once; and that was at 2 a.m. when he woke her up to tell her that he was having the time of his life, and she replied by asking him whether he had let the cat in, and returned to her dreams.

Bairdstown’s Suffering Womanhood—as per advertisement—turned out extensively and self-commiseratingly to the free lecture of Tuesday evening, bringing with them a considerable admixture of the male populace, curious, cynical, or expectant. On the platform sat a number of “special guests,” including the Rev. Mr. Huddleston, mild of face and white of hair, and the Honorable Silas Harris, owner of the “Bugle.”

“Cured” patients, to the number of half a dozen, fidgeted in the seats of honor with expressions of conscious and pleasurable importance.

“They appear to be enjoying poor health quite literally,” whispered Clyde to Dr. Strong, as the two, begrimed with the dust of a long day’s travel just finished, slipped quietly into side seats.

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.”