Meanwhile, with his creative instinct repressed, his acquisitive instinct, the race-instinct that rose as the personal instinct fell, was stimulated to the highest degree. Money was so "easy" in Nevada that one could hardly think of anything else. "I met three friends one afternoon," he says in "Roughing It," "who said they had been buying 'Overman' stock at auction at eight dollars a foot. One said if I would come up to his office he would give me fifteen feet; another said he would add fifteen; the third said he would do the same. But I was going after an inquest and could not stop. A few weeks afterward they sold all their 'Overman' at six hundred dollars a foot and generously came around to tell me about it--and also to urge me to accept of the next forty-five feet of it that people tried to force on me. These are actual facts, and I could make the list a long one and still confine myself strictly to the truth. Many a time friends gave me as much as twenty-five feet of stock that was selling at twenty-five dollars a foot; and they thought no more of it than they would of offering a guest a cigar. These were 'flush times' indeed!" In short, in order to stand in with pioneer society, it was not enough to repress everything in you that made you "different"; you had to form extravagant habits, you had to treat money like water, and you had to make it! Mark Twain was not merely obliged to check his creative instinct; he was obliged to do his level best to become a millionaire.