"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 over the contract, and were three hundred thousand ahead." "But was that fair to the flour people?" I asked doubtfully. "Fair?" retorted Talbot. "What in thunder did they put the forfeit clause in for if it wasn't expected we might use it?"