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He came out of the mysterious South one summer day, driving before him a few sheep, a cow, and a long-eared mule which carried his tent and other necessaries, and camped outside the town on a knoll, at the base of which was a thicket of close shrub. During the first day no one in Jansen thought anything of it, for it was a land of pilgrimage, and hundreds came and went on their journeys in search of free homesteads and good water and pasturage. But when, after three days, he was still there, Nicolle Terasse, who had little to do and an insatiable curiosity, went out to see him. He found a new sensation for Jansen. This is what he said when he came back:

“You want know ’bout him, bagosh! Dat is somet’ing to see, dat man–Ingles is his name. Sooch hair–mooch long an’ brown, and a leetla beard not so brown, an’ a leather sole onto his feet, and a gray coat to his ankles–oui, so like dat. An’ his voice–voila, it is like water in a cave. He is a great man–I dunno not; but he spik at me like dis, ‘Is dere sick, and cripple, and stay-in-bed people here dat can’t get up?’ he say. An’ I say, ‘Not plenty, but some–bagosh! Dere is dat Miss Greet, an’ ole Ma’am Drouchy, an’ dat young Pete Hayes–an’ so on.’ ‘Well, if they have faith I will heal them,’ he spik at me. ‘From de Healing Springs dey shall rise to walk,’ he say. Bagosh, you not t’ink dat true? Den you go see.”

So Jansen turned out to see, and besides the man they found a curious thing. At the foot of the knoll, in a space which he had cleared, was a hot spring that bubbled and rose and sank, and drained away into the thirsty ground. Luck had been with Ingles the Faith Healer. Whether he knew of the existence of this spring, or whether he chanced upon it, he did not say; but while he held Jansen in the palm of his hand, in the feverish days that followed, there were many who attached mysterious significance to it, who claimed for it supernatural origin. In any case, the one man who had known of the existence of this spring was far away from Jansen, and he did not return till a day of reckoning came for the Faith Healer.

Meanwhile, Jansen made pilgrimage to the Springs of Healing, and at unexpected times Ingles suddenly appeared in the town, and stood at street corners; and in his “Patmian voice,” as Flood Rawley the lawyer called it, warned the people to flee their sins, and, purifying their hearts, learn to cure all ills of mind and body, the weaknesses of the sinful flesh and the “ancient evil” in their souls, by faith that saves.

“‘Is not the life more than meat?‘” he asked them. “And if, peradventure, there be those among you who have true belief in hearts all purged of evil, and yet are maimed, or sick of body, come to me, and I will lay my hands upon you, and I will heal you.” Thus he cried.

There were those so wrought upon by his strange eloquence and spiritual passion, so hypnotized by his physical and mental exaltation, that they rose up from the hand-laying and the prayer eased of their ailments. Others he called upon to lie in the hot spring at the foot of the hill for varying periods, before the laying-on of hands, and these also, crippled or rigid with troubles of the bone, announced that they were healed.

People flocked from other towns, and though, to some who had been cured, their pains and sickness returned, there were a few who bore perfect evidence to his teaching and healing, and followed him, “converted and consecrated,” as though he were a new Messiah. In this corner of the West was such a revival as none could remember–not even those who had been to camp-meetings in the East in their youth, and had seen the Spirit descend upon hundreds and draw them to the anxious seat.