The consequence of Sabinsport's blindness and her refusal to accept responsibility heaped up every day--the girl question, as they called it. There were sudden marriages which shocked and distressed her. There were no marriages, that horrified her even more. A new type of women began to appear in the streets. And again and again on Saturday afternoons soldiers were taken back to camp, but not to barracks--to the guard house. Irritation and disgust with the camp grew in the town, and then, late in November, sickness began. It ran rampant through the camp, still insufficiently equipped with hospitals and doctors and nurses to handle anything like an epidemic. Heartbreaking tales of deaths, from lack of care, it was charged, filled the town. Nancy who, from the opening of the camp, had given practically all of her time to whatever service she could put her hands to, and who by her common sense, her skill, her sweetness, had won completely officers, doctors, and nurses, now gave herself up to regular nursing, coming back only once a week for a half-day's rest--on Monday afternoon always, though nobody at the time thought about that.
Dick practically spent his days and nights in service. He, too, had from the start been received by officers and doctors as one of those rare civilians who can be allowed the freedom of a camp and really help, not hinder, its work.
But Sabinsport was not rallying to the efforts of Nancy and Dick. The town was horrified at the things that she saw going on. She bitterly blamed the commanding officer, the War Department, the Government. She resented the intimations that she had had from both the authorities in the City and in the camp that her failure to deal resolutely with her saloons and with the strange women who were finding shelter within her limits, was a menace to the boys. Matters were not at all helped by the kind of agitation which had begun in the town, with the hope of controlling the situation. The center of this agitation was Mrs. Susan Katcham, president of an old-time temperance organization--a good, aggressive, tactless woman, whose main effect upon Sabinsport had always been to steel even the sober to the support of the saloon.