nrad when he was shot; and
it went through his mind that he would get Dryfoos to drive him to a
hatter's, where he could buy a new hat, and not be obliged to confess
his narrow escape to his wife till the incident was some days old and
she could bear it better. It quite drove Lindau's death out of his mind
for the moment; and when Dryfoos said if he was going home he would
drive up to the first cross-street and turn back with him, March said he
would be glad if he would take him to a hat-store. The old man put his
head out again and told the driver to take them to the Fifth Avenue
Hotel. "There's a hat-store around there somewhere, seems to me," he
said; and they talked of March's accident as well as they could in the
rattle and clatter of the street till they reached the place. March
got his hat, passing a joke with the hatter about the impossibility of
pressing his old hat over again, and came out to thank Dryfoos and take
leave of him.

"If you ain't in any great hurry," the old man said, "I wish you'd get
in here a minute. I'd like to have a little talk with you."

"Oh, certainly," said March, and he thought: "It's coming now about what
he intends to do with 'Every Other Week.' Well, I might as well have all
the misery at once and have it over."

Dryfoos called up to his driver, who bent his head down sidewise to
listen: "Go over there on Madison Avenue, onto that asphalt, and keep
drivin' up and down till I stop you. I can't hear myself think on these
pavements," he said to March. But after they got upon the asphalt, and
began smoothly rolling over it, he seemed in no haste to begin. At last
he said, "I wanted to talk with you about that--that Dutchman that was
at my dinner--Lindau," and March's heart gave a jump with wonder whether
he could already have heard of Lindau's death; but in an instant he
perceived that this was impossible. "I been talkin' with Fulkerson about
him, and he says they had to take the balance of his arm off."

March nodded; it seemed to him he could not speak. He could not make out
from the close face of the old man anything of his motive. It was set,
but set as a piece of broken mechanism is when it has lost the power
to relax itself. There was no other history in it of what the man had
passed through in his son's death.

"I don't know," Dryfoos resumed, looking aside at the cloth
window-strap, which he kept fingering, "as you quite understood what
made me the maddest. I didn't tell hi