“I hope he isn't dead! Say, did you see that smile? My God, I'll never forget it!”
The exclamation poignantly voiced the esteem in which Krebs was held. As I was thrust along out of the hall by the ebb of the crowd still other expressions of this esteem came to me in fragments, expressions of sorrow and dismay, of a loyalty I had not imagined. Mingled with these were occasional remarks of skeptics shaken, in human fashion, by the suggestion of the inevitable end that never fails to sober and terrify humanity.
“I guess he was a bigger man than we thought. There was a lot of sense in what he had to say.”
“There sure was,” the companion of this speaker answered.
They spoke of him in the past tense. I was seized and obsessed by the fear that I should never see him again, and at the same moment I realized sharply that this was the one thing I wanted—to see him. I pushed through the people, gained the street, and fairly ran down the alley that led to the side entrance of the hall, where a small group was gathered under the light that hung above the doorway. There stood on the step, a little above the others, a young man in a grey flannel shirt, evidently a mechanic. I addressed him.
“What does the doctor say?”
Before replying he surveyed me with surprise and, I think, with instinctive suspicion of my clothes and bearing.
“What can he say?” he retorted.
“You mean—?” I began.
“I mean Mr. Krebs oughtn't never to have gone into this campaign,” he answered, relenting a trifle, perhaps at the tone of my voice. “He knew it, too, and some of us fellows tried to stop him. But we couldn't do nothing with him,” he added dejectedly.