A Hazard of New Fortunes, Part Fourth

, where she sat before an autumnal fire, shaking her head and talking to herself at times, with the foreboding of evil which old women like her make part of their religion. The girls stood

long talk with Mela at Mrs. Horn's, in the absence of any other admirer, they based a superstition of his interest in he

uests, and the same dryness seemed to be in his palm and throat, as he huskily asked each to take a chair. Conrad's coat was of modern texture and cut, and was buttoned about him as if it concealed a bad conscience within its lapels; he met March with his entreating smile, and he seemed no more capable of coping with the situation than his father. They both waited for Fulkerson, who went about and did his best to keep life in the party during the half-hour that passed before they sat down at dinner. Beaton stood gloomily aloof, as if waiting to be approached on the right basis before yielding an inch of his ground; Colonel Woodburn, awaiting the moment when he could sally out on his hobby, kept himself intrenched within the dignity of a gentleman, and examined askance the figure of old Lindau as he stared about the room, with his fine head up, and his empty sleeve dangling over his

one hand on Kendricks's shoulder, and one on the colonel's, and made some flattering joke, apparently at the expense of the young fellow, and then left them. March heard Kendricks protest in vain, and the colonel say, gravely: "I do not wonder, sir, that th

Lindau's elbow. Fulkerson called out, "Here's Colonel Woodburn, Mr. Dryfoos," as if Dryfoos were looking for him; and he set the example of what he was to do by taking Lindau's arm himself. "Mr. Lindau is going to sit at my end of the table, alongside of March. Stand not upon the order of your going, gentlemen, but fall in at once." He contrived to get Dryfoos and

gin to put Apollinaris in his champagne-glass at the right moment;

d Lindau patted him on the shoulder. "I know hiss veakness. If he liges a class of

ouldn't have been thin

dri

posed, with lofty courtesy, "champagne c

deferentially. "He seemed to think that sack and sug

that," suggested Beaton, who then felt that

n champagne did co

o come in," said Fulker

do. Dryfoos listened uneasily; he did not quite understand the allusions, though he knew what Shakespeare wa

d they laughed when they were hit. The wine loosed Colonel Woodburn's tongue; he became very companionable with the young fellows; with the fee

d the name of Flaubert as a master of style

right, sir," the colonel assent

e and Maupassant; he sai

erses from Baudelaire;

e, and gave a passage f

vy German accent, and

peaudifool! Not zo?"

f course, you know I th

in

t his hand on March's back. "This poy-he was a poy den-wars so gracy to pekin reading Heine that he

there in Indianapolis. Just how long ago did you old codgers meet there, anyway?" Fulkerson saw the restiveness in Dryfoos's eye at the purely literary course the talk had taken; he had inte

ifty-nine or zixty, Passil? Idt wass a yea

e general talk. "I went down to Indianapolis with the first company from

weather, but git o

nd for the la

p and down four or five abreast in the moonli

head slowly up and down. "A coodt many off them nef

was going round with the champagne bottle. "Fill up Mr. Lindau's glass, there. I want to drink the health of those old times with him.

aid the colonel. "I will drink w

ch to get up, somebody! Fill high the bowl with Samian

ir knife-handles. Lindau remained seated. The tears came into

fill up the quota at every call, and when the volunteering stopped I went round with the subscription paper myself; and we offered as good bounties as any in

erial-in the magazine? The war has never fully panned out in fiction yet. It was used a good deal just after

nto the war, and that he had often made that explanation of his course without having ever been satisfie

rature. How would 'The Autobiography of a Substitute' do? You might follow him up to the moment he was killed in the other man's place, and inqu

it. We canonized all that died or suffered in it, but some of them must have been self-seeking and low-minded, like men in other vocati

the fieldt of pattle the voarst eggsipitions of human paseness-chelousy, fanity, ecodistic bridte

'Every Other Week' if we could get some of those idea

red him in saying, "I

al," the old man interrupted

said, with a glance of

corporal

, though if you gentlemen will pardon me for saying so, I think they were less frequent on ours. We were fighting more immediately fo

their impression. Dryfo

t is

l work up those ideas into a short paper-say, three

the motives that led men to the cannon's mouth as no higher than business motives, and hi

d how commercialism was the poison at the heart of our national life; how we began as a simple, agricultural people, who had fled to these shores with the instinct, divinely implanted, of building a state such as the sun never shone upon before; how we had conquered the wilderness and the savage; how we had flung off, in our struggle with the mother-country, the trammels of tradition and precedent, and had settled down, a free nation, to the practice of the arts of peace; how the spirit of commercialism had stolen insidiously upon us, and

and he knew he had never been in that. He did not like to hear competition called infernal; he had always supposed it was something sacred; but he approved of what Colonel Woodburn said of the Standard Oil C

aid more and more fiercely, "You are righdt, you are righdt." His eyes glowed, his hand played with his knife-hilt. When th

y thunder!" sho

p from a small pit in the centre of the base, and represented the gas in combustion as it issued from the ground. Fulkerson burst into a roar of laughter with the words that recognized Frescobaldi's personal tribute to Dryfoos. Everybody rose and peered over at the thing,

ongratulate you," Fulkerson called to him. "

rubbing his hands as he bowed right and left, permitted h

nd his guests had sunk into their seats again, he said dryly to Fulkerson, "I reckon the

e wiggly-waggly blue flame-that the gas acts when you touch off a goo

w they bore away sometimes till they get half-way to China, and don't seem to strike anything worth speaking of. Then they put a dynamite torpedo down in the well and explode it. They have a little bar of iron that they call a Go-devil, and they just drop it down on the business end of the torpedo, and then stand from under, if you please! You hear a noise, and in about half a minute you begin to see one, and it begins to rain oil and mud and salt water and rocks and pitchforks and adoptive citizens; and when it clears up the derrick's painted-got a coat on that 'll wear in any climate. That's what our honored host meant. Generally get some visiting lady, when there's one round, to drop the Go-devil. But that day we had to put up with Conrad here. They offered to let me drop it, but I declined. I told 'em I hadn't much practice with Go-devils in the newspaper syndicate business, and I wasn't very well myself, anywa

urned his eyes toward Colonel Woodburn. "I had all sorts of men to deal with in develop

e laboring-man reasona

au p

ir bread was buttered. I did have one little difficulty at one time. It happened

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 Ad

ounting intensity, and heard him mu

re 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 Dr

ffair purely from an aesthetic point of view. "Suc

n German to March. "He's an infamous t

ce: "For Heaven's sake, don't, Lindau! You owe it to yourself not to make a scene, if

not to have noticed Lindau, who controlled himself

your Pinkertons couldn't have give

s not to employ any man who would not swear that he was non-union. If they had attempted violence, of course they could have be

ghout. for a chance to mount his hobby again, "they make a good dea

lkerson. "But the men that undertake to override the laws and paralyze

e is always a danger of the exceptional in your system. The fact is, those fellows have the game in their own hands already. A strike of the whole body of the Brotherhood of Engineers alone would st

aracter of the conjecture. He imagined a fiction deali

e of Dorking act with that thing?"

thinking, Mr. Fulker

sference. Better see March, here, about it. I'd like

eople to thinking as well as

erial stuck straight outward, "if I had my way, there wouldn't be any Brothe

You would sobbress the un

I wo

alists-the drosts-and gompines, and boolss? Would yo

said Dryfoos, with

d on his shoulder imploringly, and Lindau turned to him to say in German: "But it is

r conspiracy laws, and that kind of thing, it might bring the climax sooner than you expected. Your commercialize

st till it feelss its rottenness, like Herodt. Boat, when its hour gomes,

anew; and we shall build upon the central idea, not of the false liberty you now worship, but of responsibility -responsibility. The enlightened, the moneyed, the cultivated class shall be responsible to the central authority-emperor,

e, and shall be subject to its command in war. The rich shall warrant the poor against planless produ

sdarfe. He will go to the State, and the State will see that he haf voark, and that he haf foodt. All the roadts and mills and mines and landts shall be the beople's and be ron by the

n, not well knowing, after so much

oodburn said coldly to Lindau, "Y

ng feutalism!" ret

se, what would become of 'Every Other Week'? Who would want March for an editor? How would Beaton sell his pictures? Who would print Mr. Kendricks's little society verses and short stories?

ickering, "I wonder if there's enough natural gas left to light my cigar." His effort put the flame out and knocked the derrick over; it broke in fragments on the table. Fulkerso

k of it," said the

said to Frescobaldi's man, "You can

with a haughty bow to the company; Colonel Woodburn shook hands elaborately all round, when he had smoked h