But he had another and to him a still more vital reason for wishing to make a great sum of money. Half a million dollars, particularly when spectacularly acquired, alters a man’s position in his community at once, and the readjustment of his own mental attitude toward life follows as a matter of course; particularly in a country where money not only talks but rules. He was now treated, when business took him to any of the towns, as a permanent capitalist of the great state of Montana; moreover, his romantic attitude toward his hill having been inevitably dampened by its yield of mere copper, his appreciation of its heavy contribution to his bank account was wholly practical. He not only began to forecast himself as one of the small group of front-rank millionaires which Montana has donated to the American Brotherhood of Millionaires, but to be sensible of the sudden and active growth of those business instincts he had always known were dormant in his brain. It had needed but the rousing of his fighting instinct, the success of its first move, and the swift countermove of the enemy, to awaken the permanent desire, not alone to pit his brains against Amalgamated, but to show the world what he could do. In short he was on his mettle, and conscious for the first time of his powers and ultimate ambitions. He had found his mine by an accident. Nature had flung it into his lap. He was now determined to prove that he could make money with the resources of his brain as rapidly as the more famous of the Montanans had made it in the past, when opportunities were supposed to be more numerous. There never was a time when opportunity did not coincide with the man, and of this Gregory was contemptuously aware when he dismissed the usual Wall Street resource as commonplace, beneath the consideration of a man living in a state whose resources had barely been tapped. When live brains of peculiar gifts think hard and uninterruptedly on a given subject they become magnets. Gregory paid frequent visits to Butte and Helena, talking casually with many men. In less than a fortnight he found his cue, and, accompanied by a civil engineer, disappeared for a week. XXVIII