--that was
Cort--was sacked I went to Boston on my own hook and tackled the old
gentleman--that's the only way to get anywhere. I couldn't bear to see
the mill going to scrap, and I told him a thing or two,--I had the facts
and the figures. Stephen Chippering was a big man, but he had a streak of
obstinacy in him, he was conservative, you bet. I had to get it across to
him there was a lot of dead wood in this plant, I had to wake him up to
the fact that the twentieth century was here. He had to be shown--he was
from Boston, you know--" Ditmar laughed--"but he was all wool and a yard
wide, and he liked me and trusted me.

"That was in nineteen hundred. I can remember the interview as well as if
it had happened last night--we sat up until two o'clock in the morning in
that library of his with the marble busts and the leather-bound books and
the double windows looking out over the Charles, where the wind was
blowing a gale. And at last he said, `All right, Claude, go ahead. I'll
put you in as agent, and stand behind you.' And by thunder, he did stand
behind me. He was quiet, the finest looking old man I ever saw in my
life, straight as a ramrod, with a little white goatee and a red,
weathered face full of creases, and a skin that looked as if it had been
pricked all over with needles--the old Boston sort. They don't seem to
turn 'em out any more. Why, I have a picture of him here."

He opened a drawer in his desk and drew out a photograph. Janet gazed at
it sympathetically.

"It doesn't give you any notion of those eyes of his," Ditmar said,
reminiscently. "They looked right through a man's skull, no matter how
thick it was. If anything went wrong, I never wasted any time in telling
him about it, and I guess it was one reason he liked me. Some of the
people up here didn't understand him, kow-towed to him, they were scared
of him, and if he thought they had something up their sleeves he looked
as if he were going to eat 'em alive. Regular fighting eyes, the kind
that get inside of a man and turn the light on. And he sat so still--made
you ashamed of yourself. Well, he was a born fighter, went from Harvard
into the Rebellion and was left for dead at Seven Oaks, where one of the
company found him and saved him. He set that may up for life, and never
talked about it, either. See what he wrote on the bottom--'To my friend,
Claude Ditmar, Stephen Chippering.' And believe me, when he once called a
man a friend he never took it