Dryfoos modestly dropped his head under Fulkerson’s flattery and, without lifting it, turned his eyes toward Colonel Woodburn.  “I had all sorts of men to deal with in developing my property out there, but I had very little trouble with them, generally speaking.”

“Ah, ah! you foundt the laboring-man reasonable—­dractable—­tocile?” Lindau put in.

“Yes, generally speaking,” Dryfoos answered.  “They mostly knew which side of their bread was buttered.  I did have one little difficulty at one time.  It happened to be when Mr. Fulkerson was out there.  Some of the men tried to form a union—­”

“No, no!” cried Fulkerson.  “Let me tell that!  I know you wouldn’t do yourself justice, Mr. Dryfoos, and I want ’em to know how a strike can be managed, if you take it in time.  You see, some of those fellows got a notion that there ought to be a union among the working-men to keep up wages, and dictate to the employers, and Mr. Dryfoos’s foreman was the ringleader in the business.  They understood pretty well that as soon as he found it out that foreman would walk the plank, and so they watched out till they thought they had Mr. Dryfoos just where they wanted him—­everything on the keen jump, and every man worth his weight in diamonds—­and then they came to him, and—­told him to sign a promise to keep that foreman to the end of the season, or till he was through with the work on the Dryfoos and Hendry Addition, under penalty of having them all knock off.  Mr. Dryfoos smelled a mouse, but he couldn’t tell where the mouse was; he saw that they did have him, and he signed, of course.  There wasn’t anything really against the fellow, anyway; he was a first-rate man, and he did his duty every time; only he’d got some of those ideas into his head, and they turned it.  Mr. Dryfoos signed, and then he laid low.”

March saw Lindau listening with a mounting intensity, and heard him murmur in German, “Shameful! shameful!”

Fulkerson went on:  “Well, it wasn’t long before they began to show their hand, but Mr. Dryfoos kept dark.  He agreed to everything; there never was such an obliging capitalist before; there wasn’t a thing they asked of him that he didn’t do, with the greatest of pleasure, and all went merry as a marriage-bell till one morning a whole gang of fresh men marched into the Dryfoos and Hendry Addition, under the escort of a dozen Pinkertons with repeating rifles at half-cock, and about fifty fellows found themselves out of a job.  You never saw such a mad set.”

“Pretty neat,” said Kendricks, who looked at the affair purely from an aesthetic point of view.  “Such a coup as that would tell tremendously in a play.”

“That was vile treason,” said Lindau in German to March.  “He’s an infamous traitor!  I cannot stay here.  I must go.”

He struggled to rise, while March held him by the coat, and implored him under his voice:  “For Heaven’s sake, don’t, Lindau!  You owe it to yourself not to make a scene, if you come here.”  Something in it all affected him comically; he could not help laughing.