urned 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