Looking back on the Mariposa Whirlwind, I can never feel that it was
a failure. After all, there is a sympathy and a brotherhood in these
things when men work shoulder to shoulder. If you had seen the
canvassers of the Committee going round the town that evening
shoulder to shoulder from the Mariposa House to the Continental and
up to Mullins's rooms and over to Duffs, shoulder to shoulder, you'd
have understood it.

I don't say that every lunch was quite such a success as the first.
It's not always easy to get out of the store if you're a busy man,
and a good many of the Whirlwind Committee found that they had just
time to hurry down and snatch their lunch and get back again. Still,
they came, and snatched it. As long as the lunches lasted, they came.
Even if they had simply to rush it and grab something to eat and
drink without time to talk to anybody, they came.

No, no, it was not lack of enthusiasm that killed the Whirlwind
Campaign in Mariposa. It must have been something else. I don't just
know what it was but I think it had something to do with the
financial, the book-keeping side of the thing.

It may have been, too, that the organization was not quite correctly
planned. You see, if practically everybody is on the committees, it
is awfully hard to try to find men to canvass, and it is not
allowable for the captains and the committee men to canvass one
another, because their gifts are spontaneous. So the only thing that
the different groups could do was to wait round in some likely
place--say the bar parlour of Smith's Hotel--in the hope that
somebody might come in who could be canvassed.