when I worked ten and twelve hours a day,
and I'm man enough to do it yet, if I have to. When the last agent--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 fri