According to the lookout thus kept for this person, it was reported that he had been seen to pass on foot through towns lying south of Denver, meanly dressed and accompanied by a young man named Linford. To all inquiries he answered that he was on his way to fast in the desert as his "Father" had commanded. His companion was even less communicative, saying somewhat irritably that his goings and comings were nobody's business but his own.
Some six months later the remains of the unfortunate person were found in a wild place far to the south, with his Bible and his blanket. It was supposed that he had starved. Of Linford no further trace had been discovered.
The most absurd tales were now told, said Mr. Gridley, of the miracles of healing wrought by this person--told, moreover, by persons of intelligence whom in ordinary matters one would not hesitate to trust. There had even been a story started, which was widely believed, that he had raised the dead; moreover, many of those who had been deluded into believing themselves healed, looked forward confidently to his own resurrection.
Mr. Gridley ventured the opinion that we should be thankful to the daily press which now disseminates the news of such things promptly, instead of allowing it to travel slowly by word of mouth, as it did in less advanced times--a process in which a little truth becomes very shortly a mighty untruth. Even between Denver and Omaha he had observed that the wonder-tales of this person grew apace, thus proving the inaccuracy of the human mind as a reporter of fact. Without the check of an unemotional daily press Mr. Gridley suspected that the poor creature's performances would have been magnified by credulous gossip until he became the founder of a new religion--a thing especially to be dreaded in a day when the people were crazed for any new thing--as Paul found them in Athens.
Mr. Gridley mentioned further that the person had suffered from what the alienists called "morbid delusions of grandeur"--believing, indeed, that but One other in the universe was greater than himself; that he would sit at the right hand of Power to judge all the world. His most puerile pretension, however, was that he meant to live, even if the work required a thousand years, until such time as he could save all persons into heaven, so that hell need have no occupants.