Strange to say, we met at first little or no opposition from our strong rivals. Whether it was that Strauss and his crowd were willing to let the mice foregather into one trap before showing their claws, or that they despised us as weaklings, no one could say. We were able, even, to join the great packers in one of those private agreements that made it possible for us to secure our share of the home trade. Mr. Dround was aware of this fact, but averted his eyes. Necessity knows little squeamishness. It must have filled John Carmichael with unholy joy to know that Dround had come to this compromise with his virtue. So, in spite of the hard times, we pushed on, branching out here and there as the chance offered, building a plant in Texas, where Will was sent to take charge, and making a deal with a car line that had been started by some Boston men. But the time came when we had to have more money, and have it at once. There was none to be raised in Chicago, where the frost of the panic had settled first and hardest. Slocum, who was my right hand all these months, suggested that the money might be had from the Boston men who owned the car line. So in July, '93, we made a hurried trip to the East. They were frightened in Boston, and we met with little but disappointment. Men were waiting for Congress to repeal the silver law, or do something else to make it pleasant, and wouldn't listen to putting out another dollar in a Chicago enterprise. Then it occurred to Slocum that we might interest a man he knew named Farson, the rich man of his old home, Portland. Farson, we found, was down the coast somewhere on his vacation, and we followed after him. It was the first time I had ever been in that part of the country, and the look of it was queer to me--a lot of scrawny, rocky fields and wooden-built towns. When we failed to find Farson in Portland, it did not seem to me worth while to go on--I doubted if there was as much money in the whole town as we had to have; but Sloco was strongly of the opinion that these Maine people had fortunes tucked away in their old stockings. So we kept on down the coast, and found our man at his summer cottage, on a little rocky island. This Mr. Farson was a short, wiry, little man, almost sixty years old, with a close-cropped gray mustache, and looked for all the world like a retired school-teacher. He received us on his front piazza, and it took him and Slocum half an hour to establish just the degree of cousinship they were to each other. I wanted to laugh and to put in: "We've come to make your fortune, cousin. It don't make any difference whether you are third once removed or second twice removed." But I thought it likely that Slocum knew his business best with these people and kept quiet.