Meanwhile, in the station-agent cottage, the telegraph operator was taking notes with confusion while men all around gave combative monologues punctuated with foul gestures. Beyond the current emergency was something far larger. The engineer, cheek smeared with soot, was telephoning other train operators down the line. On railways across the country that did not link to East Texas, Chaplin had also been expected!

Further, the railways were not the only places people had gathered and been disappointed. There were riots on the docks of the Gulf of Mexico, and in Rye, New York, at an airstrip, a mob had tipped over an airplane he was supposed to be on, snapping off the propeller and rolling it down a muddy hillside.

The next week’s Beaumont Sentinel ran a full account with photos of the unfortunate event. After a chronology of the riot, Beaumont’s first, was a statement from Mayor French admitting they had been confused. “What we are trying to ascertain is why we all thought Chaplin was coming. I would swear the Widow Candless said so, but she says she heard it from me.”

So Beaumont, in the course of a few hours, had gone from prosperity and the prospect of fame, to being the home of a burnt-out shell of a passenger train. The cars sat on the siding with occasional wisps of smoke and ash rising into the air, and when the winds carried toward town, people would stiffen in embarrassment, then continue on their way.

They were not alone. The next day, the Kansas City Star asked in its headline, “HAD YOU THE CHAPLIN-ITIS?” There was an account of his being paged in over eight hundred hotels, the failed rescue at sea off the California coast, his anticipated arrival at train stations, and below was an artist’s conception of that day’s commotion in Kansas City, when Chaplin had been seen wreaking havoc at the baseball field, knocking down an outfielder as he dove for a fly ball. He stumbled through a church picnic in Knoxville, and in New York City, at 31st and Sixth Avenue, he tied up traffic during a manic boxing match with a hotheaded bruiser of a cop. He was seen clutching the mane of a horse galloping across a field in West Virginia, and falling into a vat of offal in a Chicago stockyard. And then he was gone.

Such is the nature of the inexplicable that, as long as it does not involve money, it can be ignored. Within several weeks, the Chaplin-itis was forgotten, except for one small report.