Mr. Oates’s conversation might not be brilliant, but it was continuous. Pierce and his friends had begun with some notion of dangling their own escapades before him like dancing dolls before a child; they had told him something of the affair of the Colonel and his cabbage, of the captain and his pigs, of the parson and his elephants; but they soon found that their hearer had not come there merely as a listener. What he thought of their romantic buffooneries it would be hard to say; probably he did not understand them, possibly he did not even hear them. Anyhow, his own monologue went on. He was a leisurely speaker. They found themselves revising much that they had heard about the snap and smartness and hurry of American talk. He spoke without haste or embarrassment, his eye boring into space, and he more than fulfilled Mr. Pierce’s hopes of somebody who would talk about business matters. His talk was a mild torrent of facts and figures, especially figures. In fact the background was doing all it could to contribute the required undertone of common commercial life. The background was justifying all their hopes that it would be practical and prosaic. Only the background had rather the air of having become the foreground. “When they put that up to me I saw it was the proposition,” Mr. Oates was saying. “I saw I’d got on to something better than my old regulation turnover of eighty-five thousand dollars on each branch. I reckoned I should save a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in the long run by scrapping the old plant, even if I had to drop another thirty thousand dollars on new works, where I’d get the raw material for a red cent. I saw right away that was the point to freeze on to; that I just got a chance to sell something I didn’t need to buy; something that could be sort of given away like old match-ends. I figured out it would be better by a long chalk to let the other guys rear the stock and sell me their refuse for next to nix, so I could get ahead with turning it into the goods. So I started in right away and got there at the first go-off with an increase of seven hundred and fifty-one thousand dollars.” “Seven hundred and fifty-one thousand dollars,” murmured Owen Hood. “How soothing it all seems.” “I reckon those mutts didn’t get on to what they were selling me,” continued Mr. Oates, “or didn’t have the pep to use it that way themselves; for though it was the sure-enough hot tip, it isn’t everybody would have thought of it. When I was in pork, of course, I wanted the other guys out; but just now I wasn’t putting anything on pork, but only on just that part of a pig I wanted and they didn’t want. By notifying all your pig farmers I was able to import nine hundred and twenty-five thousand pigs’ ears this fall, and I guess I can get consignments all winter.”