“It’s necessary, gentlemen,” he told a certain group of men a few days later as he outlined his plans. “We’ve put roughnecks up there in charge; we’ve let the social workers in and paid their salaries; we’ve put young fellows out of college up there, and none of it has worked. There’s more trouble all the time. The only thing we haven’t tried is for one of us who really is responsible to go up himself. At the present moment I can see my way to spending some time there. I won’t bring about a reformation, you know. I don’t promise to stop all the strikes, or to clean out the I. W. W. But I can promise you accurate information after a few months as to what all the trouble is about, and if anything can be done about the situation other than let it go to pot and save what we can of our money. How about it?” They listened to him with interest--all these men who had money and all the things dependent on money at stake; seeming not too serious, as is the usual way of men of big affairs, showing no great enthusiasm, no excitement. They liked Dick because he was, compared to most of them, so young and yet so sane and so successful, and they knew he’d “had trouble” with his wife, L. A. Warner’s stepdaughter, and they were sorry for that because, though the age of romance was past for them and the word love had lost its magnetism, they knew that a domestic upset was a serious thing for a young man. “Might send him to the dogs,” they would have said. “The point is that with the ‘Senator’ away (that was their jovial term for Matthew), we can’t really spare our other young man, can we? When Allenby went he assured us he was turning everything over to you to handle, and that you’d look out for us,” said old Mr. Cox, tilting his chair back and looking at Dick astutely. “The more I look at the work there is to be done, the more I see that the machinery of distribution, which is here, is in such good shape that any one of three fellows in the office, whom I could mention, could look out for it. The big problem is the problem of production, and that needs to be investigated from the ground up--not on the basis of what things were ten years ago, or five years ago, or one year ago--but as they are now.” “Let him do it,” said A. C. Miller, who spoke briefly. “Some I. W. W.’ll put a bomb under him, and we can’t spare him.” “Gentlemen,” said the chairman, with the ponderosity which had given him his position on so many boards, “may we have a motion?” They were given a motion and Dick had his way. He heard the chairs scrape back, saw the discussion break up into fragments, saw the men go out, with their friendly, terse nods to each other and a wave of energy swept over him. Mare’s nest, chimera, windmills--whatever it was that he was going to find or to tilt with, at least he had a job that was fresh and that would take him out of town. He scribbled on a telegraph blank, “Put it over all right,” and addressed it to Senator Matthew Allenby.