“Well, the colonel’s a glorious old fellow, March.  I wish he had the power to do that thing, just for the fun of looking on while he waltzed in.  He’s on the keen jump from morning till night, and he’s up late and early to see the row.  I’m afraid he’ll get shot at some of the fights; he sees them all; I can’t get any show at them:  haven’t seen a brickbat shied or a club swung yet.  Have you?”

“No, I find I can philosophize the situation about as well from the papers, and that’s what I really want to do, I suppose.  Besides, I’m solemnly pledged by Mrs. March not to go near any sort of crowd, under penalty of having her bring the children and go with me.  Her theory is that we must all die together; the children haven’t been at school since the strike began.  There’s no precaution that Mrs. March hasn’t used.  She watches me whenever I go out, and sees that I start straight for this office.”

Fulkerson laughed and said:  “Well, it’s probably the only thing that’s saved your life.  Have you seen anything of Beaton lately?”

“No.  You don’t mean to say he’s killed!”

“Not if he knows it.  But I don’t know—­What do you say, March?  What’s the reason you couldn’t get us up a paper on the strike?”

“I knew it would fetch round to ‘Every Other Week,’ somehow.”

“No, but seriously.  There ’ll be plenty of news paper accounts.  But you could treat it in the historical spirit—­like something that happened several centuries ago; De Foe’s Plague of London style.  Heigh?  What made me think of it was Beaton.  If I could get hold of him, you two could go round together and take down its aesthetic aspects.  It’s a big thing, March, this strike is.  I tell you it’s imposing to have a private war, as you say, fought out this way, in the heart of New York, and New York not minding, it a bit.  See?  Might take that view of it.  With your descriptions and Beaton’s sketches—­well, it would just be the greatest card!  Come!  What do you say?”

“Will you undertake to make it right with Mrs. March if I’m killed and she and the children are not killed with me?”

“Well, it would be difficult.  I wonder how it would do to get Kendricks to do the literary part?”

“I’ve no doubt he’d jump at the chance.  I’ve yet to see the form of literature that Kendricks wouldn’t lay down his life for.”

“Say!” March perceived that Fulkerson was about to vent another inspiration, and smiled patiently.  “Look here!  What’s the reason we couldn’t get one of the strikers to write it up for us?”

“Might have a symposium of strikers and presidents,” March suggested.

“No; I’m in earnest.  They say some of those fellows-especially the foreigners—­are educated men.  I know one fellow—­a Bohemian—­that used to edit a Bohemian newspaper here.  He could write it out in his kind of Dutch, and we could get Lindau to translate it.”

“I guess not,” said March, dryly.