If the market could have held half an hour he would have gotten out all right and turned over to you a million dollars, after using two hundred and fifty thousand for his own purposes, but when he attempted to unload the market broke; and by ---- we're all broke!" Mr. Wallingford laughed, quite mechanically, and from his pocket drew two huge black cigars with gold bands around them. "Have a smoke," he said to Mr. Fleecer. Lighting his own Havana he turned and elbowed his way out of the room. One of the men who had stood near him exchanged a wondering stare with his neighbor. "That's the limit of gameness," he observed. But he was mistaken. It was not gameness. Wallingford was merely dazed. He could find no words to express the bitter depth to which he had fallen. As he passed out through the ticker-room he glanced at the blackboard. The boy was just chalking up the latest morning quotation on September wheat--a dollar twelve. In the cab he opened his pocketbook and counted the money in it. Before he had started on this trip he had scarcely thought of money, except that at Fox & Fleecer's there would be waiting for him a cool, clean million. Instead of that he found himself with exactly fifty-four dollars. Mrs. Wallingford was in her room, pale to the lips. "How much money have you?" he asked her. Without a word she handed him her purse. A few small bills were in it. She handed him another small black leather case which he took slowly. He opened it, and from the velvet depths there gleamed up at him the old standby--her diamonds. He could get a couple of thousand dollars on these at any time. He put the case in his pocket, but without any gleam of satisfaction, and sat down heavily in one of the huge leather-padded chairs. "Fanny," said he savagely, "never preach to me again! I have tried a straight-out legitimate deal and it dumped me. Hereafter, be satisfied with whatever way I make money, just so long as I have the law on my side. Why," and his indignation over this last reflection was beyond expression, "I've coaxed a carload of money out of the farmers of this country, and I don't get away with a cent of it! A thief got it! _A thief and a grafter!_"