I had his number from the start.

He's a master crook, and--it'll pay us all to string with him." Henry Nelson's activities in the oil fields did not leave him much time in which to attend to his duties as vice-president of his father's bank, for what success he and Old Bell Nelson had had since the boom started was the direct result of the younger man's personal attention to their joint operations.

That attention was close; their success, already considerable, promised to be enormous.
But of late things had not been going well.

The turn had come with the loss of the Evans lease, and that misfortune had been followed by others.

Contrary to custom, it was Henry, and not Bell, who had flown into a rage at receipt of Gus Briskow's telegram announcing a slip-up in the deal--a sale to Calvin Gray; that message, in fact, had affected the son in a most peculiar manner.