One day the wind backs and shifts. A change portends. Even the herds of half-frozen range cattle sense it by some subtle beast-knowledge. They are no longer afraid to lie down as they may have been for a week. The danger of freezing has passed. The temperature has been at fifty degrees below zero. Now, suddenly it begins to rise. The air is scarcely in motion, but occasionally it descends as out of a blast-furnace from overhead. To the southeast is a mass of dull black clouds. Their face is unbroken. But the upper edges are ragged, torn by a wind not yet felt below. Two hours later its warmth comes. In ten minutes the mercury goes up thirty-five degrees. The wind comes at a thirty-mile velocity. It increases in strength and warmth, blowing with a mighty roar. Twelve hours afterward the snow, three feet deep on a level, has melted. There are bald, brown hills everywhere to the horizon, and the plains are flooded with water. The Chinook has come and gone. In this manner suddenly went the Bines fortune. April 30th, Consolidated Copper closed at 91. Two days later, May 2d, the same ill-fated stock closed at 5l--a drop of forty points. Roughly the decline meant the loss of a hundred million dollars to the fifteen thousand share-holders. From every city of importance in the country came tales more or less tragic of holdings wiped out, of ruined families, of defalcations and suicides. The losses in New York City alone were said to be fifty millions. A few large holders, reputed to enjoy inside information, were said to have put their stock aside and "sold short" in the knowledge of what was coming. Such tales are always popular in the Street. Others not less popular had to do with the reasons for the slump. Many were plausible. A deal with the Rothschilds for control of the Spanish mines had fallen through. Or, again, the slaughter was due to the Shepler group of Federal Oil operators, who were bent on forcing some one to unload a great quantity of the stock so that they might absorb it. The immediate causes were less recondite. The Consolidated Company, so far from controlling the output, was suddenly shown to control actually less than fifty per cent of it. Its efforts to amend or repeal the hardy old law of Supply and Demand had simply met with the indifferent success that has marked all such efforts since the first attempted corner in stone hatchets, or mastodon tusks, or whatever it may have been. In the language of one of its newspaper critics, the "Trust" had been "founded on misconception and prompted along lines of self-destruction. Its fundamental principles were the restriction of product, the increase of price, and the throttling of competition, a trinity that would wreck any combination, business, political, or social."