2
The first of Henry's meaty, fantastic little stories of the plain folk of the village, that one called The Caliph of Simpson Street, had appeared in the Gleaner of the preceding Saturday. It had made a distinct stir.
The second story was out on this the Saturday of our present narrative. In the order of writing, and in Henry's plans, it should have been The Cauliflowers of the Caliph. But Bob McGibbon, hanging wearily over the form in the press room late Friday night, suddenly hit on the notion of putting Sinbad the Treasurer in its place. He had all but the last one or two in type by that time. There were no mechanical difficulties; and he didn't consult the author. He could hit Charlie Waterhouse harder this way. The Cauliflowers was quietly humorous; while Sinbad the Treasurer had a punch. That was how McGibbon put it to the foreman, Jimmy Albers. The word 'punch' was fresh slang then. McGibbon himself introduced it into Sunbury.
Henry had Charlie and the town money in the back of his head, of course, when he wrote Sinbad. Probably more than he himself knew. McGibbon sniffed a sensation in the brief, vivid narrative. And a sensation of some sort he had to have. It was now or never with McGibbon.... He was able even to chuckle at the way Charlie would froth. He couldn't admit that the coat fitted, of course. He would just have to froth. It was Henry's naïveté that made the thing so perfect. An older man wouldn't have dared. Henry had just naturally rushed in. Yes, it was perfect.
Bob McGibbon was a hustler. And his nervous quickness of perception had brought him a few small successes and was to bring him larger ones. His Sunbury disaster was perhaps later to be charged to education.
The roots of that particular failure went deep. From first to last his attitude was that of a New Yorker in a small town. He outraged every local prejudice; he alienated, one by one, each friendly influence. He couldn't understand that any such village as Sunbury resents the outsider who insists on pointing out its little human failings. It was recognised here and there as possible that old man Boice and Mr Weston of the bank might be covering up something in the matter of the genial town treasurer; but there was reason enough to believe that Mr Boice and Mr Weston knew pretty well what they were about. That, at least, was the rather equivocal position into which McGibbon by his very energy and assertiveness, drove many a ruffled citizen.
And it had needed very little urging on the part of the three leading citizens (McGibbon had a trick of referring to them in his paper as 'the Old Cinch') to bring about the boycott on the part of the Simpson Street and South Sunbury advertisers. As Charlie Waterhouse himself put it:—
'It ain't what he says about me. I can stand it. Man to man I can attend to him. The thing is, he's hurtin' the town. That's it—he's hurtin' the town.'