THE main office of the Dodge Manufacturing Company hummed with activity. Six typewriters were trembling under a high-speed pounding; shipping-clerks scurried hither and thither; bookkeepers buried their noses deeper in the pages of stuffy ledgers and ostentatiously displayed ink-smeared finger-tips. Even the office-boy temporarily paused in his enthralling pastime of carving the credit man's quartered-oak desk to answer the stentorian call of the filing-clerk, an underling ordinarily beneath his notice. Then Mr. Thaddeus Dodge, president of the company, finished his stroll through the general office and slammed the door of his private sanctum. Six typewriter keys were hit with a final aggressive bang; six stenographers leaned back and rearranged their hair into more fluffy array. Bookkeepers straightened their bent backs and drummed tattooes with their pens. The office-boy abruptly paused in his mission for the filing-clerk and consigned that worthy to the lower regions. One of the bookkeepers shivered slightly. "When the old man sails through this here office," he vouchsafed, "I gets the shivers!" His fellow slaves of the high stools tittered—with one exception. To Jim Lynch, the head bookkeeper, any mention of the great Dodge in terms other than those of reverence savored of heresy. Yet Jim said nothing. Mechanically he dipped his pen in the ink-well and prepared for more of the never-ending grind