The officer lifted his club, and the old man threw his left arm up to shield his head.  Conrad recognized Zindau, and now he saw the empty sleeve dangle in the air over the stump of his wrist.  He heard a shot in that turmoil beside the car, and something seemed to strike him in the breast.  He was going to say to the policeman:  “Don’t strike him!  He’s an old soldier!  You see he has no hand!” but he could not speak, he could not move his tongue.  The policeman stood there; he saw his face:  it was not bad, not cruel; it was like the face of a statue, fixed, perdurable—­a mere image of irresponsible and involuntary authority.  Then Conrad fell forward, pierced through the heart by that shot fired from the car.

March heard the shot as he scrambled out of his car, and at the same moment he saw Lindau drop under the club of the policeman, who left him where he fell and joined the rest of the squad in pursuing the rioters.  The fighting round the car in the avenue ceased; the driver whipped his horses into a gallop, and the place was left empty.

March would have liked to run; he thought how his wife had implored him to keep away from the rioting; but he could not have left Lindau lying there if he would.  Something stronger than his will drew him to the spot, and there he saw Conrad, dead beside the old man.

VI.

In the cares which Mrs. March shared with her husband that night she was supported partly by principle, but mainly by the, potent excitement which bewildered Conrad’s family and took all reality from what had happened.  It was nearly midnight when the Marches left them and walked away toward the Elevated station with Fulkerson.  Everything had been done, by that time, that could be done; and Fulkerson was not without that satisfaction in the business-like despatch of all the details which attends each step in such an affair and helps to make death tolerable even to the most sorely stricken.  We are creatures of the moment; we live from one little space to another; and only one interest at a time fills these.  Fulkerson was cheerful when they got into the street, almost gay; and Mrs. March experienced a rebound from her depression which she felt that she ought not to have experienced.  But she condoned the offence a little in herself, because her husband remained so constant in his gravity; and, pending the final accounting he must make her for having been where he could be of so much use from the first instant of the calamity, she was tenderly, gratefully proud of all the use he had been to Conrad’s family, and especially his miserable old father.  To her mind, March was the principal actor in the whole affair, and much more important in having seen it than those who had suffered in it.  In fact, he had suffered incomparably.

“Well, well,” said Fulkerson.  “They’ll get along now.  We’ve done all we could, and there’s nothing left but for them to bear it.  Of course it’s awful, but I guess it ’ll come out all right.  I mean,” he added, “they’ll pull through now.”