"Mr. Miller, we'd like to talk to you. Talk seriously."
"Afraid that I'll get mad and fly out the window?"
"I said seriously. It won't take long. Let's compress it into one short sentence without the preliminaries: give these gentlemen a demonstration like the last one."
I told him what he could do with his demonstration, and I told him what he could do with his generals. The high school boy grinned when I said that. He must have been old enough to have served in the army.
The generals were crimson. You don't get that kind of talk where they worked. But the old man was unperturbed. "Let's make that one sentence a paragraph. Give these gentlemen a demonstration as effective as the last-and ten minutes after, if you like, you can walk out of here free as the air."
I jumped at that. "Is that straight? If I do it again you'll let me loose?"
He nodded. "If you really want to."
I persisted. "Straight, now? On your word of honor?"
He wasn't lying. "If you want my word you have it."
I grinned all over like a dog. "Bring on your fans, or whatever you have cooked up."