they don't like the way we manage our affairs let 'em stay at
home," Fulkerson continued. "They do a lot of mischief, shooting off
their mouths round here. I believe in free speech and all that; but I'd
like to see these fellows shut up in jail and left to jaw one another to
death. We don't want any of their poison."

March did not notice the vanishing Socialist. He was watching, with a
teasing sense of familiarity, a tall, shabbily dressed, elderly man, who
had just come in. He had the aquiline profile uncommon among Germans,
and yet March recognized him at once as German. His long, soft beard and
mustache had once been fair, and they kept some tone of their yellow in
the gray to which they had turned. His eyes were full, and his lips and
chin shaped the beard to the noble outline which shows in the beards the
Italian masters liked to paint for their Last Suppers. His carriage was
erect and soldierly, and March presently saw that he had lost his left
hand. He took his place at a table where the overworked waiter found
time to cut up his meat and put everything in easy reach of his right
hand.

"Well," Fulkerson resumed, "they took me round everywhere in Moffitt,
and showed me their big wells--lit 'em up for a private view, and let me
hear them purr with the soft accents of a mass-meeting of locomotives.
Why, when they let one of these wells loose in a meadow that they'd
piped it into temporarily, it drove the flame away forty feet from the
mouth of the pipe and blew it over half an acre of ground. They say when
they let one of their big wells burn away all winter before they had
learned how to control it, that well kept up a little summer all around
it; the grass stayed green, and the flowers bloomed all through the
winter. I don't know whether it's so or not. But I can believe anything
of natural gas. My! but it was beautiful when they turned on the full
force of that well and shot a roman candle into the gas--that's the
way they light it--and a plume of fire about twenty feet wide and
seventy-five feet high, all red and yellow and violet, jumped into the
sky, and that big roar shook the ground under your feet! You felt like
saying:

"'Don't trouble yourself; I'm perfectly convinced. I believe in
Moffitt.' We-e-e-ll!" drawled Fulkerson, with a long breath, "that's
where I met old Dryfoos."

"Oh yes!--Dryfoos," said March. He observed that the waiter had brought
the old one-handed German a towering glass of beer.