“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.

“Why not?  He’d do it for the cause, wouldn’t he?  Suppose you put it up on him the next time you see him.”

“I don’t see Lindau any more,” said March.  He added, “I guess he’s renounced me along with Mr. Dryfoos’s money.”

“Pshaw!  You don’t mean he hasn’t been round since?”

“He came for a while, but he’s left off coming now.  I don’t feel particularly gay about it,” March said, with some resentment of Fulkerson’s grin.  “He’s left me in debt to him for lessons to the children.”

Fulkerson laughed out.  “Well, he is the greatest old fool!  Who’d ‘a’ thought he’d ‘a’ been in earnest with those ‘brincibles’ of his?  But I suppose there have to be just such cranks; it takes all kinds to make a world.”

“There has to be one such crank, it seems,” March partially assented.  “One’s enough for me.”

“I reckon this thing is nuts for Lindau, too,” said Fulkerson.  “Why, it must act like a schooner of beer on him all the while, to see ‘gabidal’ embarrassed like it is by this strike.  It must make old Lindau feel like he was back behind those barricades at Berlin.  Well, he’s a splendid old fellow; pity he drinks, as I remarked once before.”