I
believe, to some six thousand dollars. With his share of this money he
had laid narrow margins on a dozen options. Day by day, week by week,
his operations extended. He was in wharves, sand lots, shore lots,
lightering, plank roads, a new hotel. Day after day, week after week, he
had turned these things over, and at each turn money had dropped out.
Sometimes the plaything proved empty, and then Talbot had promptly
thrown it away, apparently without afterthought or regret. I remember
some of the details of one deal:

"It looked to me," said Talbot, "that somebody ought to make a good
thing in flour, the way things were going. It all comes from South
America just now, so enough capital ought to be able to control the
supply. I got together four of the big men here and we agreed with the
agents to take not less than a hundred and fifty thousand barrels nor
more than two hundred thousand barrels at fourteen dollars. Each firm
agreed to take seven hundred thousand dollars' worth; and each agreed to
forfeit one hundred thousand dollars for failure to comply. Flour could
be held to twenty-five to thirty dollars a barrel; so there was a good
thing."

"I should think so," I agreed. "Where did you come in?"

"Percentage of the profits. They took and sold quite a heap of flour at
this rate--sixty thousand barrels to be exact--on which there was a net
profit of seven hundred thousand dollars. Then one of those freak things
happened that knocked us all silly. Flour just dropped down out of
sight. Why? Manipulation. They've got a smart lot out here. The mines
had flour enough for the time being; and the only thing that held the
price up was the uncertainty of just where the flour was coming from in
the future. Well, the other crowd satisfied that uncertainty, and our
flour dropped from about twenty-five dollars down to eight. We had sold
sixty thousand barrels, and we had ninety thousand to take on our
contract, on each one of which we were due to lose six dollars. And the
other fellows were sitting back chuckling and waiting for us to unload
cheap flour."

"What was there to do?"

Talbot laughed. "I told our crowd that I had always been taught that
when a thing was hot, to drop it before I got burned. If each firm paid
its forfeit it would cost us four hundred thousand dollars. If we sold
all the flour contracted for at the present price, we stood to lose
nearer six hundred thousand. So we simply paid our forfeits, threw ov