"My dear infant," he observed; "when Fox & Fleecer got ready to sell my near-two-million bushels of wheat this morning, somebody had to be ready to buy them. I provided the buyers. That's all." "Oh!" exclaimed Mrs. Wallingford, and pondered the matter slowly. "I see. But, Jim! Mr. Hines, Mr. Evans, Mr. Whetmore, Mr. Granice, and the others--to whom do they sell after they have bought your wheat?" "The sheriff," interposed Blackie with a grin. "Not necessarily," Wallingford hastened to contradict him in answer to the troubled frown upon his wife's brow. "My deal don't disturb the market, and I expect wheat to go on up to at least a dollar and a half. If these farmers get out on the way up they make money. But the boobs who buy from them----" "Ain't it funny?" inquired Blackie plaintively. "There's always a herd of 'em just crazy eager to grab the hot end." A boy came on the train with evening papers containing the closing market quotations. Wheat had touched thirty-four, but a quick break had come at the close, back to twenty-six! Another column told why. Every cent of advance in the actual grain had brought out cash wheat in floods. Members of the great Farmers' Commercial Association had hurried their holdings to market, trusting to the great body of the loosely bound organizations to keep up the price--and the great body of the organization was doing precisely the same thing. At bottom they had, in fact, small faith in it, and the Board of Trade, sensitive as a barometer, was quick to feel this psychological change in the situation. Wallingford said nothing of this to his wife. He had begun to fear her. Always she had set herself against actual dishonesty, and more so than ever of late as he had begun to pride himself upon being a great financier. In the smoking compartment, however, he handed the paper to Blackie Daw, with his thumb upon the quotations. "There's the answer," he said. "The Rubes have cut their own throats, as I figured they would, and you'll see wheat tumble to lower than it was when this raise began. Hines and Evans and Granice and the rest of them will hold the bag on this deal, and they needn't blame it to me. They can only blame it to the fact that farmers won't stick. I'm lucky that they hung together long enough to reach my price of a dollar and a quarter." "How do you know you got out?" asked Blackie, passing over as a matter of no moment whatever the fact that all their neighbors of Truscot and Mapes Counties, who had followed "Judge" Wallingford's lead and urging in the matter of speculation, would lose their all; as would hundreds if not thousands of other "members" who had been led through the deftly worded columns of the _Commercial Farmer_ to gamble in their own grain.