Poor old Sunbury was shaken heavily and often that summer. First by the Mamie Wilcox scandal. The sort of thing that didn't, couldn't happen. Men leaving town, and all that. A miserable, hastily contrived marriage. Henry's name dragged in, unjustly (as it happened), but convincingly. Though Henry always worked best after some sort of a blow. He had to be shaken out of himself. I think. It isn't likely that he could or would have written Satraps of the Simple if this particular blow hadn't fallen. It was a feverish job. He was stung, quivering, helpless. And then his great gift functioned.
Then Madame Watt happened to Sunbury. And shook the village to its roots.
And then came Bob McGibbon's last and mightiest effort.
When all commuting Sunbury converged on the old red brick 'depot' that morning for the seven-eleven and the seven forty-six and the eight-three and the eight-twenty-nine, hoarsely bellowing newsboys held the two ends of the platform. They wore cotton caps with 'The Weekly Gleaner' printed around the front. They were big, deep-throated roughs, the sort that shout 'extras' through the cities. They crowded the local newsdealer, little Mr Beamer, back into one of the waiting-rooms.
They fairly intimidated the town. People bought the Gleaner in self-defence, even boarded trains and rode off to Chicago without their regular Tribune or Record or Inter Ocean.
Other newsmen roamed the shady, pleasant residence streets, bellowing. Housewives, old gentlemen, servants, hurried out to buy.
There were posters on the fences, and, along the billboards from Rockwell Park on the south to Borea on the north. McGibbon actually rented the space from the Northern Billboard Company. And there were newsmen with caps, in the afternoon, attacking the North Shore home-comers in the Chicago station, the very heart of things. All this—posters screaming like the news-men; big wood type, red and black—to advertise Sinbad the Treasurer and the rest of the long series and Henry Calverly.
'Attack' is the word. McGibbon was assaulting the town and the region as it had hardly been assaulted before. If it was his last, it was surely his most outrageous act from the local point of view. People talked, boiled, raged. The blatancy of the thing irritated them to the point of impotent mutterings. They were helpless. McGibbon was breaking no laws. He was stirring them, however feverish his condition of mind, with deliberate intent. It was his notion of advertising. Reaching the mark, regardless of obstacles, indifference, difficulties. And had his personal circumstances been less harrowing he could have chuckled happily at the result.
The noise fell upon the ear drums of Charlie Waterhouse as he walked down-town. A ragged, red-faced pirate thrust a Gleaner into his hand, snatched his nickel, and rushed off, bellowing.
Charlie began reading Sinbad the Treasurer as he walked. He finished it standing on the turf by the sidewalk, ignoring passing acquaintances, nervously biting and mouthing a cigar that had gone out. In the same condition he read bits of it again. He stood for a while, wavering; then went back home, and spoke roughly to Mrs Waterhouse when she asked him why. He hid the paper from her, to no particular purpose. He didn't appear at the town hall all day, but caught a trolley into Chicago and went to a dime museum. Later in the day he was seen by two venturesome youths sitting alone in the rear of a stage box at Sam T. Jack's.