As he finished speaking a curious sound came from somewhere deep in his throat. And though his impassive face remained unmoved, though not a ghost of a smile was apparent, Audie knew that the man was chuckling with suppressed glee. She, too, felt like laughing, and it was the first time she had so felt since the hideous nightmare of the storm, and its accompanying disaster.
CHAPTER IX
IN SAN SABATANO
San Sabatano was not a big city, but it was a very busy one. At least its citizens thought so, and their four-sheeted two-cent local news-sheet fostered their belief. No doubt a New Yorker would have spoken of San Sabatano as a "Rube" town, an expression which implied extreme provincialism in the smallest possible way. It also implied that its citizens had never turned their eyes upon those things which lay beyond the town-limits, within which they had been "raised." In short, that they knew nothing of the life of the great world about them, except what their paper told them in one single column. Naturally enough one column of the worlds news against twenty or more columns of local interest gave readers a false perspective, especially when every citizen of any local standing usually found a paragraph devoted to his own social or municipal doings.
But then the editor was a shrewd journalist of very wide experience. No, he had not been "raised" in San Sabatano. He had served his apprenticeship on the live journals of the East. He understood men, and the times in which he lived. More than all, he understood making money, and the factor which his women readers were in that process. So the world's news was packed into obscure corners, and San Sabatano was the hub around which his imagination revolved.
So it came about that this individual had for months darkly hinted that the San Sabatano Daily Citizen had something up its editorial sleeve with which it intended to stagger humanity, and startle its readers into a belief that an echo of the San Francisco earthquake, or something of that nature, had reached them. He told them that the mighty combination of brain that controlled the Daily Citizen and guided San Sabatano public opinion had given birth to an epoch-making thought; a thought which, before long, when the rest of a sluggish world read of it, would lift San Sabatano as a center of enterprise, of learning, of culture, to the highest pinnacle of fame known to the world.
San Sabatano stood agog with breathless expectancy for weeks.
Then came the humanity staggerer.
It occupied a whole page of the Daily Citizen. The type was enormous, and had been borrowed for the occasion. Fortunately it came in a slack time. The citizens of San Sabatano had been so long held agog that nothing much else had been doing to afford the editor local copy. Therefore the epoch-making brain wave had full scope, and the use of a prodigal supply of black and red ink.