Dean’s eyes had become sober and thoughtful; he spoke slowly, as though invoking memory. “You’ve called me a self-made man. But, as a matter of fact, it was the mere accident that I was on the spot which gave me that first order; and that order made me sales manager within two months’ time. By and by the automobile came along, and Old Jasper remodeled his factory and went after the business--with me in charge. He gave me some stock; and a year or two later his son Charlie died and took the heart out of the old man. He offered to sell out to me, and I gave him a bundle of notes for the whole thing. The business paid them off inside of five years. Do you see? The fact that I was salesman made me sales manager; the fact that I was sales manager made me vice-president; the fact that I was vice-president threw the business into my hands; and the fact that everybody wanted to buy cars has done the rest. Still call me a self-made man?” “After all,” Jenkins suggested, “you had made good or you wouldn’t have been given the job as salesman.” Dean nodded emphatically. “That’s the key to the whole structure,” he agreed. “That first job as salesman. And that’s what I want to tell you about. If you care to hear.” The reporter did care to hear, and this--as he shaped the tale in his thoughts thereafter--is what he heard: II Homer Dean and Will Matthews grew up in adjoining back yards, fought and bled with and for each other as boys will, went through high school side by side, took a business course given by a broken-down bookkeeper in a bare room over the Thornton Drug Store, and went to work in the offices of the Hopkins Tool Company within a month of each other, as vacancies occurred there. Will got the first job, Homer the second. They helped with labels in the shipping room, kept checking lists, and eventually graduated to keeping books. The tool company was a one-man concern. Old Jasper Hopkins had founded it, and intended to turn it over to his boy Charlie when his own time should be done. Old Jasper--he was then no more than in his late forties, but he was Old Jasper just the same--was a man of many eccentricities. He had begun as a mechanic, a machinist; and he had mastered the machinery of the shop, but never mastered the machinery of business. He picked machinists for his shop work, but for the white-collar jobs he chose men with no grime under their finger nails. Who sought a job with him began in the shipping room, and advanced--if he had merit--through regular and accustomed channels. Keeping books was the second rung of the ladder. Jasper could not multiply eight by seven; he had a vast respect for any man who could.