“By Jove, Strathmore,” cried the partner, who had been a newspaper man in his youth and saw a sensation in this, “I wouldn’t take my oath that it isn’t all right. He’s just the sort of a dilapidated old miser who would turn out to be a rich man.”
“Impossible,” said Strathmore.
“Improbable, perhaps, but a telegram to Detroit would soon let us know.”
And it did let them know. The inhabitants of Stumpville learned next morning that an old man had died in one of their most ruinous shanties who could have bought and sold each of them, and all of them combined.
When the telegram came announcing his uncle’s death John Steele rose from his desk, locked the door, and paced up and down the room with bent head. He had not expected this outcome, for although his uncle was old, he had weathered so many gales, it had not occurred to the young man that there must come one storm which would lay the gnarled old oak level with the ground. Unavailingly did he regret that a consideration for his own position had kept him from the bedside. With a sigh he stopped his walk, pulled himself together, sat down at his desk, and wrote a brief note to Blair, saying he had just received a telegram informing him of the death of his uncle; that he intended to start by the next train for Michigan, and would put Johnson temporarily in his place. He might be gone as long as three days, but anything addressed to Stumpville would find him. Pinning the telegram to this, and folding up the documents, he sealed them into an envelope addressed to T. Acton Blair, and sent the letter by a messenger to the general manager’s room. He knew that official was in his office, but until the time John took his train there came no response to his note. He called in Johnson, and briefly placed him in transient command. The young man received his appointment with a smug satisfaction that he found it impossible quite to conceal, and although his departing chief noticed this, he made no comment upon it.
During his journey to Stumpville John Steele meditated upon his plan of campaign. The sense of injustice he had felt ever since Blair refused him permission to visit his uncle was now crystallised into a determination to use the iron gauntlet rather than the velvet glove in future. Naturally he was of a conciliatory disposition, but the exercise of forbearance had resulted in failure and disorganisation. The next move lay with the general manager. If Blair persisted in dismissing him, he would appeal to Cæsar, for Cæsar himself had placed him in the position he held.
Arriving at Stumpville, he went direct to the telegraph office, and found awaiting him a despatch which, he was well aware without opening it, came from the general manager; no one else knew his address. The fact that he telegraphed instead of sending a messenger to his room in the same building, which he had had ample time to do, seemed to Steele the first sign of weakness. Blair wished to settle this matter at long range. Tearing open the envelope he read: “I am amazed that you should have left your post without at least personal consultation with me. I have made your appointment of Johnson permanent, but will hold his former office open for you unless you decline to accept it.”
Steele smiled grimly as he read these words. They showed that Blair had not the courage definitely to dismiss him. The general manager was afraid to burn his bridges behind him, hoping possibly that Steele would telegraph his resignation or his indignant refusal of the subordinate position.
Before leaving the city, John Steele had withdrawn from the bank several hundred dollars in order that he might pay any debts his uncle had contracted, and in order also that his funeral should be as imposing as if the old man had been the leading citizen of the place. Then to his amazement he learned that Dugald Steele had made him comparatively a rich man, but this independence made no difference in Steele’s projects for the future. He liked work for its own sake, and he was particularly attached to the duty which chance and good fortune had assigned to him. He was not going to allow that task to be interfered with by a pompous wind-bag like T. Acton Blair, and much less so by a gang of undisciplined subordinates who needed to hear the crack of the whip over their heads.
On the journey back to the city, however, a germ of thought formed in his mind, for the present to lie dormant, but in the future to develop into marvellous things, watered by circumstance, fertilised by disaster. Pondering on the strange, almost repulsive character of the old miser who was gone, it occurred to John Steele that mere hoarding could never have produced the sum of money he had accumulated. In his uncle’s mental equipment there must have been a shrewd understanding of the world’s affairs, of which he secretly took advantage to his own enrichment. Quite unsuspected by his neighbours this recluse had played a game of finance that proved marvellously successful. This could not have been done in Stumpville. Dugald Steele had evidently worked through a broker in some large city, and John Steele began to wonder if he, too, had inherited this seventh sense of money-making which has produced those bulky unearned fortunes for which America is celebrated or notorious.