It was for the exercise of powers thus directed that he sought opportunities. He would know what to do with them, he was very sure, when they came. He selected Thebes as the scene of his first endeavors because it presented the completest possible contrast to Jefferson. As Jefferson was a city that had ceased to thrive, so Thebes was one that was just about to begin to thrive, as its citizens took pains to notify the rest of the world. Braine wanted to help it thrive, and share its thrift.
The bread-and-butter problem gave him no trouble. Thebes had plenty of work to do in getting ready to prosper, and Braine was prepared to do any work. The shrewd speculators who were engineering the town's scheme of greatness, were quick enough to discover the youth's capacities, as the race-course speculator is to see the fine points of a horse. In whatever fell to him to do he acquitted himself so well that faith in "young Braine" soon gave place to respectful admiration, and Mose Harbell wrote numberless paragraphs in the Thebes Daily Enterprise concerning "our genial and gifted young townsman, Edgar Braine," in which, for reasons that Mose could not have explained, there was notably less of the "genial" insolence of familiarity than was common in Mose's literary productions. When some one mentioned this in Mose's presence, his reply was:
"Well, somehow Braine isn't the sort of fellow you feel like slapping on the back."
It was Abner Hildreth who first drew Braine into relations with the Enterprise.
There was "one of Thebes's oldest and most genial citizens"—Jack Summers by name—who, in addition to a mercantile business, carried on a bank of the kind that opens in the evening by preference, while Abner Hildreth, in all his career as a banker, had preferred daylight hours for business.
Jack Summers corrupted the youth of the town, and when one promising young clerk in the Express office was caught opening money packages, his fall was clearly enough traced to his losses in Summers's establishment.
Hildreth, as a banker and business man, objected to gambling—of that kind. He saw how surely it must undermine the other kind by destroying the trustworthiness of clerks and cashiers. He deprecated it, also, as a thing imperilling the young prosperity of Thebes, in which his investments, as merchant, banker, hotel proprietor, mill owner and the like, were greater than those of any other ten men combined, while even with the other ten he was a silent partner so far as their ventures seemed to him sound.
"The town mustn't get a hard name," he said; "Jack Summers must shut up his gambling shop, or get out of Thebes."
Then he sent for Edgar Braine.
"That young fellow," he reflected, "knows how to write with vim, force, pathos, and energy"—a favorite phrase with Hildreth—"and he has sand in him too. He can skin Summers, and rub aqua fortis into the raw, and he ain't afraid to do it."