Now Sabinsport was simple-minded. She was not very good--that is, not without her own cynicism, hard-headedness, hypocrisies. She didn't pretend to any great virtue, but she would not stand for broken contracts. "You couldn't do business that way," was the common feeling in Sabinsport. She was harsh with people who broke bargains and saw to it always they were punished. If the sinner was able by influence in bribery or cleverness to escape the law, Sabinsport punished him in her own way. She never forgot and she built up a cloud of suspicion about the man so that he knew she had not forgotten. Men had left Sabinsport because of her intangible, persistent disapproval of violated agreements, repudiated debts. The invasion of Belgium, then, was classed in the town's mind with the things she wouldn't stand for.
Moreover, the deed had been done with cruelty, and Sabinsport could not stand for that. She might--and did--overlook a great deal of the normal cruelty of daily life--cruelties of neglect and snobbery and bad conditions, but the out-and-out thing she wouldn't stand. A boy caught tying a tin can to a dog's tail in Sabinsport would be threatened by the police, held up to scorn in school and thrashed at home. A man who beat his wife or child went to jail, and one of Sabinsport's reasons for mistrusting the motley group of foreigners in its mines and mills was the stories of their harsh treatment of their women.
The steady flow of news of repeated, continued violence in Belgium stirred Sabinsport to deeper and deeper indignation. The Sunday before Patsy's letter arrived a group of leading men and women asked Dick to start a relief fund; the Sunday after, almost everybody doubled his subscription, for the letter clinched their personal judgment of the case. "She's been there; she says it as we thought."
There was another element in Belgium's case that took a mighty grip on Sabinsport, particularly the men and boys. It was the little nation's courage. Many a man came to Dick with a subscription because it was so "damned plucky." Belgium's courage had no deeper admirers than Mulligan and Cowder. Jake swore long and loud and gave generously. Cowder said little, but the largest sum the fund received in these first days was slipped into Dick's hand by Reuben Cowder with a simple, "Got guts--that country has."
