“I guess he was a bigger man than we thought.  There was a lot of sense in what he had to say.”

“There sure was,” the companion of this speaker answered.

They spoke of him in the past tense.  I was seized and obsessed by the fear that I should never see him again, and at the same moment I realized sharply that this was the one thing I wanted—­to see him.  I pushed through the people, gained the street, and fairly ran down the alley that led to the side entrance of the hall, where a small group was gathered under the light that hung above the doorway.  There stood on the step, a little above the others, a young man in a grey flannel shirt, evidently a mechanic.  I addressed him.

“What does the doctor say?”

Before replying he surveyed me with surprise and, I think, with instinctive suspicion of my clothes and bearing.

“What can he say?” he retorted.

“You mean—?” I began.

“I mean Mr. Krebs oughtn’t never to have gone into this campaign,” he answered, relenting a trifle, perhaps at the tone of my voice.  “He knew it, too, and some of us fellows tried to stop him.  But we couldn’t do nothing with him,” he added dejectedly.

“What is—­the trouble?” I asked.

“They tell me it’s his heart.  He wouldn’t talk about it.”

“When I think of what he done for our union!” exclaimed a thick-set man, plainly a steel worker.  “He’s just wore himself out, fighting that crooked gang.”  He stared with sudden aggressiveness at me.  “Haven’t I seen you some-wheres?” he demanded.

A denial was on my lips when the sharp, sinister strokes of a bell were heard coming nearer.

“It’s the ambulance,” said the man on the step.

Glancing up the alley beyond the figures of two policemen who had arrived and were holding the people back, I saw the hood of the conveyance as it came to a halt, and immediately a hospital doctor and two assistants carrying a stretcher hurried towards us, and we made way for them to enter.  After a brief interval, they were heard coming slowly down the steps inside.  By the white, cruel light of the arc I saw Krebs lying motionless....  I laid hold of one of the men who had been on the platform.  He did not resent the act, he seemed to anticipate my question.

“He’s conscious.  The doctors expect him to rally when he gets to the hospital.”

I walked back to the Club to discover that several inquiries had been made about me.  Reporters had been there, Republican Headquarters had telephoned to know if I were ill.  Leaving word that I was not to be disturbed under any circumstances, I went to my room, and spent most of the night in distracted thought.  When at last morning came I breakfasted early, searching the newspapers for accounts of the occurrence at Templar’s Hall; and the fact that these were neither conspicuous nor circumstantial was in the nature of a triumph of self-control on the part of editors and reporters.  News, however sensational, had severely to be condensed in the interest of a cause, and at this critical stage of the campaign to make a tragic hero of Hermann Krebs would have been the height of folly.  There were a couple of paragraphs giving the gist of his speech, and a statement at the end that he had been taken ill and conveyed to the Presbyterian Hospital....