Although he was terribly afraid of
discovery, he felt a little glow of pride at the thought of the boldness
with which he had taken the letters out of his pocket and had challenged
the two men to call his bluff.
Steve, however, felt there was something different about the man in the
telegraph office in Pickleville. He had been in town for nearly two years
and no one knew anything about him. His silence might be indicative of
anything. He was afraid the tall silent Missourian might decide to have
nothing to do with him, and pictured himself as being brushed rudely aside,
being told to mind his own business.
Steve knew instinctively how to handle business men. One simply created the
notion of money to be made without effort. He had done that to the two men
in the bank and it had worked. After all he had succeeded in making them
respect him. He had handled the situation. He wasn't such a fool at that
kind of a thing. The other thing he had to face might be very different.
Perhaps after all Hugh McVey was a big inventor, a man with a powerful
creative mind. It was possible he had been sent to Bidwell by a big
business man of some city. Big business men did strange, mysterious things;
they put wires out in all directions, controlled a thousand little avenues
for the creation of wealth.
Just starting out on his own career as a man of affairs, Steve had an
overpowering respect for what he thought of as the subtlety of men of
affairs.
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