“Paddock; O Lord!” he ejaculated.
A clock tinkled five on the mantel and Wayne’s manner changed. He pointed to the outer door.
“You’d better clear out. Stop in the front office and tell Mr. Walsh I’m here, do you understand?”
“Say, Mrs. Blair’s been lookin’ for you; she’s had the ’phone goin’ for two days. She flew in her machine to Rosedale to look for you but they were on and didn’t give it away. You better call her up.”
“Yes, I’ll attend to it; clear out.”
Already Colonel Craighill had quietly entered the adjoining room followed by an office boy bearing a travelling bag. On his desk lay a dozen sheets of paper, hardly larger than a playing card, and these he examined with the swift ease of habit. They were reports, condensed to the smallest compass, and expressed in bald dollars and tons all the Craighill enterprises. It was thus that Roger Craighill, like a great commander, viewed the broad field of his operations through the eyes of others. Bank balances; totals of bills payable and receivable; so much coal mined at one point; so many tons of coke ready for shipment at another; the visible tonnage in the general market; the day’s prices—these bare data were communicated to the chief daily at the close of business, and in his frequent absences were sent to him by wire. He summoned a boy.
“Please say to Mr. Walsh that I’m ready to see him.”
Walsh appeared instantly: he had, indeed, been awaiting the summons, and was prepared for it. A definite routine attended every return of the chief to his headquarters. He invariably called Walsh, his chief of staff; and thereafter was ready to see his son. In every business office the high powers are merely tolerated by the subordinates, to whom the senior partner or the president is usually “the boss” or “the old man.” Roger Craighill was not to be so apostrophized even behind his back: he was “the Colonel” to everyone. To a few contemporaries only was Craighill “Roger” and these were citizens bound together by memories of the old city, who as young men had cheered Kossuth through the streets in 1851, and who a decade later had met in the Committee of Safety or marched South with musket or sword in hand.
“Ah, Walsh, how is everything going? I see that the pumps at No. 18 are out of order again. I think I’d better go after the Watkins people personally about that; we’ve been patient enough with them.”
Walsh nodded. He was short and thick and quite bald. He had formerly been the “credit man” of one of the Craighill enterprises, which, it happened, was a wholesale grocery; but he had grown into the confidence of Roger Craighill and when Craighill organized the grocery business into a corporation and began directing it from the fourteenth story of the Craighill building, Walsh became Craighill’s confidential man of affairs, with broad administrative powers.