“I made this mill, and I’m proud of it,” he went on.  “When old Stephen Chippering put me in charge he was losing money, he’d had three agents in four years.  The old man knew I had it in me, and I knew it, if I do say it myself.  All this union labour talk about shorter hours makes me sick—­why, there was a time 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 friend, Claude Ditmar, Stephen Chippering.’  And believe me, when he once called a man a friend he never took it back.  I know one thing, I’ll never get another friend like him.”