So it went and so it kept on going. Every time Good Sam set his willing hands to lifting some unfortunate fellow citizen out of a difficulty he won himself at least one more sincere critic before he was through. Even so, as long as he stuck to retailing it wasn’t so bad. Certain parts of town he was invited to stay out of but there were other neighborhoods that he could still piroot around in without much danger of being assassinated. It was only when he branched out as a jobber that his waning popularity soured in a single hour. That was when the entire community clabbered on him, as you might say, by acclamation.
It happened this way: Other towns east and west of us were having booms, but our town, seemed like, was being left out in the cold. She wasn’t growing a particle. So some of the leading people got up a mass-meeting to decide on ways and means of putting Triple Falls on the map. One fellow would rise up and suggest doing this and another fellow would rise up and suggest doing that; but every proposition called for money and about that time money was kind of a scarce article amongst us. So far as I was concerned, it was practically extinct.
Along toward the shank of the evening Good Sam took the floor.
“Gents,” he said, “I craves your attention. There’s just one sure way of boosting a town and that’s by advertising it. Get its name in print on all the front pages over the country. Get it talked about; stir up curiosity; arouse public interest. That brings new people in and they bring their loose coinage with ’em and next thing you know you’ve got prosperity by the tail with a down-hill pull. Now, I’ve got a simple little scheme of my own. I love this fair young city of ours and I’m aiming to help her out of the kinks and I ain’t asking assistance from anybody else neither. Don’t ask me how I’m going about it because in advance it’s a secret. I ain’t telling. You just leave it to me and I’ll guarantee that inside of one week or less this’ll be the most talked-about town of its size in the whole United States; with folks swarming in here by every train—why, they’ll be running special excursions on the railroad. And it’s not going to cost a single one of you a single red cent, neither.”
Of course his past record should have been a plentiful warning. Somebody ought to have headed him off and bent a six-gun over his skull. But no, like the misguided suckers that we were, we let him go off and cook up his surprise.
I will say this: He kept his promise—he got us talked about and he brought strangers in. Inside of forty-eight hours special writers from newspapers all over the Rocky Mountains were pouring in and strangers were dropping off of through trains with pleased, expectant looks on their faces; and Father Staples was getting rush telegrams from his bishop asking how about it, and the Reverend Claypool—he was the Methodist minister—was hurrying back from conference all of a tremble, and various others who’d been away were lathering back home as fast as they could get here.
What’d happened? I’m coming to that now. All that happened was that Good Sam got the local correspondent for the press association stewed, and seduced him into sending out a dispatch that he’d written out himself, which it stated that an East Indian sun worshiper had lighted in Triple Falls and started up a revival meeting, and such was his hypnotic charm and such was the spell of his compelling fiery eloquence that almost overnight he’d converted practically the entire population—men, women, children, half-breeds, full-bloods, Chinks and Mexies—to the practice of his strange Oriental doctrines, with the result that pretty near everybody was engaged in dancing in the public street—without any clothes on!
So it was shortly after that, when cooler heads had discouraged talk of a lynching, that Good Sam left us—by request. And I haven’t seen him since.