ching too.

He was in his shirt sleeves, a man of medium height, compactly built,
and well past the half century mark. The distinguishing features of his
face were a short nose, a heavy thatch of brows, a square jaw which
showed the need of the offices of a razor and his lips wore a short,
square mustache somewhat stained by nicotine.

In point of eagerness the manner of his greeting of the newcomer left
nothing to be desired. Peter's first impression was that Jonathan K.
McGuire was quite able to look out for himself, which confirmed the
impression that the inspection to which Peter had been subjected was
nothing but a joke. But when his employer began speaking rather jerkily,
Peter noticed that his hands were unsteady and that neither the muscles
of his face nor of his body were under complete control. Normally, he
would have seemed much as Sheldon, Senior, had described him--a
hard-fisted man, a close bargainer who had won his way to his great
wealth by the sheer force of a strong personality. There was little of
softness in his face, little that was imaginative. This was not a man
to be frightened at the Unseen or to see terrors that did not exist.
Otherwise, to Peter he seemed commonplace to the last degree, of Irish
extraction probably, the kind of person one meets daily on Broadway or
on the Strand. In a fur coat he might have been taken for a banker; in
tweeds, for a small tradesman; or in his shirt as Peter now saw him, the
wristbands and collar somewhat soiled from perspiration, for a laboring
man taking his rest after an arduous day. In other words, he was very
much what his clothes would make of him, betraying his origins in a
rather strident voice meant perhaps to conceal the true state of his
mind.

"Glad to see you, Mr. Nichols. Thought you were never comin'," he jerked
out.

"I walked most of the way from Pickerel River. Something went wrong,
with the 'Lizzie.'"

"Oh--er--'Lizzie'. The flivver! I couldn't send my own car. I've got
only one down here and I might need it."

"It doesn't matter in the least--since I'm here."

"Sit down, Mr. Nichols," went on McGuire indicating a chair. "You've
been well recommended by Mr. Sheldon. I talked to him yesterday over
long distance. He told you what I wanted?"

"Something. Not much," said Peter with a view to getting all the
information possible. "You wanted a forester----?"

"Er--er--yes, that's it. A forester." And then he went on
haltingly--"I've got