They really were not sporty, being in the business to make money by hook or by crook instead of being content with the house percentage. Since suckers always lose money when they gamble in stocks--they never really speculate--you’d think these fellows would run what you might call a legitimate illegitimate business. But they didn’t. “Copper your customers and grow rich” is an old and true adage, but they did not seem ever to have heard of it and didn’t stop at plain bucketing. Several times they tried to double-cross me with the old tricks. They caught me a couple of times because I wasn’t looking. They always did that when I had taken no more than my usual line. I accused them of being short sports or worse, but they denied it and it ended by my going back to trading as usual. The beauty of doing business with a crook is that he always forgives you for catching him, so long as you don’t stop doing business with him. It’s all right as far as he is concerned. He is willing to meet you more than half-way. Magnanimous souls! Well, I made up my mind that I couldn’t afford to have the normal rate of increase of my stake impaired by crooks’ tricks, so I decided to teach them a lesson. I picked out some stock that after having been a speculative favorite had become inactive. Water-logged. If I had taken one that never had been active they would have suspected my play. I gave out buying orders on this stock to my five bucketeering brokers. When the orders were taken and they were waiting for the next quotation to come out on the tape I sent in an order through my Stock Exchange house to sell a hundred shares of that particular stock at the market. I urgently asked for quick action. Well, you can imagine what happened when the selling order got to the floor of the Exchange; a dull inactive stock that a commission house with out-of-town connections wanted to sell in a hurry. Somebody got cheap stock. But the transaction as it would be printed on the tape was the price that I would pay on my five buying orders. I was long on balance four hundred shares of that stock at a low figure. The wire house asked me what I’d heard, and I said I had a tip on it. Just before the close of the market I sent an order to my reputable house to buy back that hundred shares, and not waste any time; that I didn’t want to be short under any circumstances; and I didn’t care what they paid. So they wired to New York and the order to buy that hundred quick resulted in a sharp advance. I of course had put in selling orders for the five hundred shares that my friends had bucketed. It worked very satisfactorily.