Duplex sales doubled, and Fred’s spy in the Conqueror agency reported that salesmen who attempted to demonstrate Allover Caravans were answered with jeers. A week after the opening of Fred’s circus, Staybridge telephoned him again, but Fred found himself too busy to call. The next day Annabel came in, and Annabel was near to giggling.

‘My father asked me to tell you he thinks your Duplex cabaret is vulgar.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what?’

‘Oh, I like vulgarity. All the interesting things in life are so vulgar, Father Cornplow: birth and death and battles. Have I done my job?’

‘Eh?’

‘Have I complained properly about the vulgarity?’

‘Darling!’

Next night a curious thing happened. A man named Tom McKuffee, a truck farmer who lived nine miles south-east of Sachem, and who had bought an Allover Caravan that afternoon, had an unfortunate accident at or near midnight. In front of the Duplex show lot he tried to park his Allover, but the brakes failed, the Allover dashed in to the lot and was wrecked against a pile of rocks which no one seemed previously to have noticed there. McKuffee, though he could not stop the caravan, had time to jump.

Now he was no hit-and-run driver, even if the object of his solicitude was merely a pile of rocks. He walked to the police station, admitted the accident, and explained that the brakes had failed; explained it so eloquently that a green reporter noted the fact in his story. The detail got past the copyreaders, and in the paper next morning there was an almost libellous statement about the brakes of an Allover.

It was only an item, but the scene of one caravan wrecked, while hard by, in another, night-club ladies were dancing and sipping ginger ale from highball glasses, was too much for the art editor of the evening paper. By this time, the struggle between Duplex and Allover was so familiar to all Sachem motorists that there was no need of a legend to explain what were the makes of the caravans in the newspaper photograph.

All the day after, persons who looked as though they might have trailer money in their pockets stood and admired the cabaret, snickered at the wreck. McKuffee happened, by a coincidence, to be there, and he seemed glad to explain how the accident had occurred, and to point out how flimsy were the smashed and exposed furnishings of the Allover. By another coincidence, Fred Cornplow knew McKuffee, who had once been the Triumph foreman.

‘You ARE rubbing it in. Old Putnam will never speak to any of us again,’ Sara reproached her father, yet in her he detected admiration.

In another day there were double-page advertisements of the Allover in the papers, but people in limousines, in shops, on street corners laughed at them. The Allover wreck remained there for a week. Then came the chief of police to Fred and offered to cart it away.

‘No, you needn’t. Glad to accommodate the fellow that owns the thing — what’s his name? — McGurrey? — till he raises the money to get it overhauled.’