“I wonder what he was after and what he meant by that last?” Ben reflected, when he had fastened the gates after his strange visitor. “There’s something wrong about it, or he wouldn’t offer me thirty dollars a month for a part of this crazy old shed. He’ll wait a long time, I’m thinking, before he receives a call from me.”
After thinking the matter over, Ben concluded not to mention it to Mundon. He was afraid he might urge him to accept it, and this he did not wish to do.
CHAPTER X WORK STOPPED
The next morning Ben saw a picture of himself above the title “Our Boy Miner,” in one of the daily papers. He felt the sensationalism of it, but he could not deny that it pleased him.
“Publicity was the penalty one had to pay for being prominent,” he told himself. And the thought pulled him very erect, like a balloon tugging at his neckband.
He was elated with success. All doubts which he had previously felt about speculation being a hazardous way of making money vanished like mists before the sun. The warnings he had heard all his life from the wiseacres about the slow way being the sure way he now felt to be all nonsense. Indeed, so egotistical is success, that he even wondered that he could ever have felt any doubts.
