Chapter 19

"I tell you, Sam," retorted Jadwin, "the surplus of wheat is going out of the country--and it's going fast. And some of these shorts will have to hustle lively for it pretty soon."

"The Crookes gang, though," observed Landry, "seem pretty confident the market will break. I'm sure they were selling short this morning."

"The idea," exclaimed Jadwin, incredulously, "the idea of selling short in face of this Argentine collapse, and all this Bull news from Europe!"

"Oh, there are plenty of shorts," urged Gretry. "Plenty of them."

Try as he would, the echoes of the rumbling of the Pit reached Jadwin at every hour of the day and night. The maelstrom there at the foot of La Salle Street was swirling now with a mightier rush than for years past. Thundering, its vortex smoking, it sent its whirling far out over the country, from ocean to ocean, sweeping the wheat into its currents, sucking it in, and spewing it out again in the gigantic pulses of its ebb and flow.

And he, Jadwin, who knew its every eddy, who could foretell its every ripple, was out of it, out of it. Inactive, he sat there idle while the clamour of the Pit swelled daily louder, and while other men, men of little minds, of narrow imaginations, perversely, blindly shut their eyes to the swelling of its waters, neglecting the chances which he would have known how to use with such large, such vast results. That mysterious event which long ago he felt was preparing, was not yet consummated. The great Fact, the great Result which was at last to issue forth from all this turmoil was not yet achieved. Would it refuse to come until a master hand, all powerful, all daring, gripped the levers of the sluice gates that controlled the crashing waters of the Pit? He did not know. Was it the moment for a chief?

Was this upheaval a revolution that called aloud for its Napoleon? Would another, not himself, at last, seeing where so many shut their eyes, step into the place of high command?

Jadwin chafed and fretted in his inaction. As the time when the house party should break up drew to its close, his impatience harried him like a gadfly. He took long drives over the lonely country roads, or tramped the hills or the frozen lake, thoughtful, preoccupied. He still held his seat upon the Board of Trade. He still retained his agents in Europe. Each morning brought him fresh despatches, each evening's paper confirmed his forecasts.

"Oh, I'm out of it for good and all," he assured his wife. "But I know the man who could take up the whole jing-bang of that Crookes crowd in one hand and"--his large fist swiftly knotted as he spoke the words--"scrunch it up like an eggshell, by George."

Landry Court often entertained Page with accounts of the doings on the Board of Trade, and about a fortnight after the Jadwins had returned to their city home he called on her one evening and brought two or three of the morning's papers.

"Have you seen this?" he asked. She shook her head.

"Well," he said, compressing his lips, and narrowing his eyes, "let me tell you, we are having pretty--lively--times--down there on the Board these days. The whole country is talking about it."

He read her certain extracts from the newspapers he had brought. The first article stated that recently a new factor had appeared in the Chicago wheat market. A "Bull" clique had evidently been formed, presumably of New York capitalists, who were ousting the Crookes crowd and were rapidly coming into control of the market. In consequence of this the price of wheat was again mounting.

Another paper spoke of a combine of St. Louis firms who were advancing prices, bulling the market. Still a third said, at the beginning of a half-column article:

"It is now universally conceded that an Unknown Bull has invaded the Chicago wheat market since the beginning of the month, and is now dominating the entire situation. The Bears profess to have no fear of this mysterious enemy, but it is a matter of fact that a multitude of shorts were driven ignominiously to cover on Tuesday last, when the Great Bull gathered in a long line of two million bushels in a single half hour. Scalping and eighth-chasing are almost entirely at an end, the smaller traders dreading to be caught on the horns of the Unknown. The new operator's identity has been carefully concealed, but whoever he is, he is a wonderful trader and is possessed of consummate nerve. It has been rumoured that he hails from New York, and is but one of a large clique who are inaugurating a Bull campaign. But our New York advices are emphatic in denying this report, and we can safely state that the Unknown Bull is a native, and a present inhabitant of the Windy City."

Page looked up at Landry quickly, and he returned her glance without speaking. There was a moment's silence.

"I guess," Landry hazarded, lowering his voice, "I guess we're both thinking of the same thing."

"But I know he told my sister that he was going to stop all that kind of thing. What do you think?"

"I hadn't ought to think anything."

"Say 'shouldn't think,' Landry."

"Shouldn't think, then, anything about it. My business is to execute Mr. Gretry's orders."

"Well, I know this," said Page, "that Mr. Jadwin is down town all day again. You know he stayed away for a while."

"Oh, that may be his real estate business that keeps him down town so much," replied Landry.

"Laura is terribly distressed," Page went on. "I can see that. They used to spend all their evenings together in the library, and Laura would read aloud to him. But now he comes home so tired that sometimes he goes to bed at nine o'clock, and Laura sits there alone reading till eleven and twelve. But she's afraid, too, of the effect upon him. He's getting so absorbed. He don't care for literature now as he did once, or was beginning to when Laura used to read to him; and he never thinks of his Sunday-school. And then, too, if you're to believe Mr. Cressler, there's a chance that he may lose if he is speculating again."

But Landry stoutly protested:

"Well, don't think for one moment that Mr. Curtis Jadwin is going to let any one get the better of him. There's no man--no, nor gang of men--could down him. He's head and shoulders above the biggest of them down there. I tell you he's Napoleonic. Yes, sir, that's what he is, Napoleonic, to say the least. Page," he declared, solemnly, "he's the greatest man I've ever known."

Very soon after this it was no longer a secret to Laura Jadwin that her husband had gone back to the wheat market, and that, too, with such impetuosity, such eagerness, that his rush had carried him to the very heart's heart of the turmoil.

He was now deeply involved; his influence began to be felt. Not an important move on the part of the "Unknown Bull," the nameless mysterious stranger that was not duly noted and discussed by the entire world of La Salle Street.

Almost his very first move, carefully guarded, executed with profoundest secrecy, had been to replace the five million bushels sold to Liverpool by five million more of the May option. This was in January, and all through February and all through the first days of March, while the cry for American wheat rose, insistent and vehement, from fifty cities and centres of eastern Europe; while the jam of men in the Wheat Pit grew ever more frantic, ever more furious, and while the impassive hand on the great dial over the floor of the Board rose, resistless, till it stood at eighty-seven, he bought steadily, gathering in the wheat, calling for it, welcoming it, receiving full in the face and with opened arms the cataract that poured in upon the Pit from Iowa and Nebraska, Minnesota and Dakota, from the dwindling bins of Illinois and the fast-emptying elevators of Kansas and Missouri.

Then, squarely in the midst of the commotion, at a time when Curtis Jadwin owned some ten million bushels of May wheat, fell the Government report on the visible supply.

"Well," said Jadwin, "what do you think of it?"

He and Gretry were in the broker's private room in the offices of Gretry, Converse & Co. They were studying the report of the Government as to the supply of wheat, which had just been published in the editions of the evening papers. It was very late in the afternoon of a lugubrious March day. Long since the gas and electricity had been lighted in the office, while in the streets the lamps at the corners were reflected downward in long shafts of light upon the drenched pavements. From the windows of the room one could see directly up La Salle Street. The cable cars, as they made the turn into or out of the street at the corner of Monroe, threw momentary glares of red and green lights across the mists of rain, and filled the air continually with the jangle of their bells. Further on one caught a glimpse of the Court House rising from the pavement like a rain-washed cliff of black basalt, picked out with winking lights, and beyond that, at the extreme end of the vista, the girders and cables of the La Salle Street bridge.

The sidewalks on either hand were encumbered with the "six o'clock crowd" that poured out incessantly from the street entrances of the office buildings. It was a crowd almost entirely of men, and they moved only in one direction, buttoned to the chin in rain coats, their umbrellas bobbing, their feet scuffling through the little pools of wet in the depressions of the sidewalk. They streamed from out the brokers' offices and commission houses on either side of La Salle Street, continually, unendingly, moving with the dragging sluggishness of the fatigue of a hard day's work. Under that grey sky and blurring veil of rain they lost their individualities, they became conglomerate--a mass, slow-moving, black. All day long the torrent had seethed and thundered through the street--the torrent that swirled out and back from that vast Pit of roaring within the Board of Trade. Now the Pit was stilled, the sluice gates of the torrent locked, and from out the thousands of offices, from out the Board of Trade itself, flowed the black and sluggish lees, the lifeless dregs that filtered back to their level for a few hours, stagnation, till in the morning, the whirlpool revolving once more, should again suck them back into its vortex.

The rain fell uninterruptedly. There was no wind. The cable cars jolted and jostled over the tracks with a strident whir of vibrating window glass. In the street, immediately in front of the entrance to the Board of Trade, a group of pigeons, garnet-eyed, trim, with coral-coloured feet and iridescent breasts, strutted and fluttered, pecking at the handfuls of wheat that a porter threw them from the windows of the floor of the Board.

"Well," repeated Jadwin, shifting with a movement of his lips his unlit cigar to the other corner of his mouth, "well, what do you think of it?"

The broker, intent upon the figures and statistics, replied only by an indefinite movement of the head.

"Why, Sam," observed Jadwin, looking up from the paper, "there's less than a hundred million bushels in the farmers' hands.... That's awfully small. Sam, that's awfully small."

"It ain't, as you might say, colossal," admitted Gretry.

There was a long silence while the two men studied the report still further. Gretry took a pamphlet of statistics from a pigeon-hole of his desk, and compared certain figures with those mentioned in the report.

Outside the rain swept against the windows with the subdued rustle of silk. A newsboy raised a Gregorian chant as he went down the street.

"By George, Sam," Jadwin said again, "do you know that a whole pile of that wheat has got to go to Europe before July? How have the shipments been?"

"About five millions a week."

"Why, think of that, twenty millions a month, and it's--let's see, April, May, June, July--four months before a new crop. Eighty million bushels will go out of the country in the next four months--eighty million out of less than a hundred millions."

"Looks that way," answered Gretry.

"Here," said Jadwin, "let's get some figures. Let's get a squint on the whole situation. Got a 'Price Current' here? Let's find out what the stocks are in Chicago. I don't believe the elevators are exactly bursting, and, say," he called after the broker, who had started for the front office, "say, find out about the primary receipts, and the Paris and Liverpool stocks. Bet you what you like that Paris and Liverpool together couldn't show ten million to save their necks."

In a few moments Gretry was back again, his hands full of pamphlets and "trade" journals.

By now the offices were quite deserted. The last clerk had gone home. Without, the neighbourhood was emptying rapidly. Only a few stragglers hurried over the glistening sidewalks; only a few lights yet remained in the facades of the tall, grey office buildings. And in the widening silence the cooing of the pigeons on the ledges and window-sills of the Board of Trade Building made itself heard with increasing distinctness.

Before Gretry's desk the two men leaned over the litter of papers. The broker's pencil was in his hand and from time to time he figured rapidly on a sheet of note paper.

"And," observed Jadwin after a while, "and you see how the millers up here in the Northwest have been grinding up all the grain in sight. Do you see that?"

"Yes," said Gretry, then he added, "navigation will be open in another month up there in the straits."

"That's so, too," exclaimed Jadwin, "and what wheat there is here will be moving out. I'd forgotten that point. Ain't you glad you aren't short of wheat these days?"

"There's plenty of fellows that are, though," returned Gretry. "I've got a lot of short wheat on my books--a lot of it."

All at once as Gretry spoke Jadwin started, and looked at him with a curious glance.

"You have, hey?" he said. "There are a lot of fellows who have sold short?"

"Oh, yes, some of Crookes' followers--yes, quite a lot of them."

Jadwin was silent a moment, tugging at his mustache. Then suddenly he leaned forward, his finger almost in Gretry's face.

"Why, look here," he cried. "Don't you see? Don't you see?"

"See what?" demanded the broker, puzzled at the other's vehemence.

Jadwin loosened his collar with a forefinger.

"Great Scott! I'll choke in a minute. See what? Why, I own ten million bushels of this wheat already, and Europe will take eighty million out of the country. Why, there ain't going to be any wheat left in Chicago by May! If I get in now and buy a long line of cash wheat, where are all these fellows who've sold short going to get it to deliver to me? Say, where are they going to get it? Come on now, tell me, where are they going to get it?"

Gretry laid down his pencil and stared at Jadwin, looked long at the papers on his desk, consulted his pencilled memoranda, then thrust his hands deep into his pockets, with a long breath. Bewildered, and as if stupefied, he gazed again into Jadwin's face.

"My God!" he murmured at last.

"Well, where are they going to get it?" Jadwin cried once more, his face suddenly scarlet.

"J.," faltered the broker, "J., I--I'm damned if I know."

And then, all in the same moment, the two men were on their feet. The event which all those past eleven months had been preparing was suddenly consummated, suddenly stood revealed, as though a veil had been ripped asunder, as though an explosion had crashed through the air upon them, deafening, blinding.

Jadwin sprang forward, gripping the broker by the shoulder.

"Sam," he shouted, "do you know--great God!--do you know what this means? Sam, we can corner the market!"

VIII

On that particular morning in April, the trading around the Wheat Pit on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade began practically a full five minutes ahead of the stroke of the gong; and the throng of brokers and clerks that surged in and about the Pit itself was so great that it overflowed and spread out over the floor between the wheat and corn pits, ousting the traders in oats from their traditional ground. The market had closed the day before with May wheat at ninety-eight and five-eighths, and the Bulls had prophesied and promised that the magic legend "Dollar wheat" would be on the Western Union wires before another twenty-four hours.

The indications pointed to a lively morning's work. Never for an instant during the past six weeks had the trading sagged or languished. The air of the Pit was surcharged with a veritable electricity; it had the effervescence of champagne, or of a mountain-top at sunrise. It was buoyant, thrilling.

The "Unknown Bull" was to all appearance still in control; the whole market hung upon his horns; and from time to time, one felt the sudden upward thrust, powerful, tremendous, as he flung the wheat up another notch. The "tailers"--the little Bulls--were radiant. In the dark, they hung hard by their unseen and mysterious friend who daily, weekly, was making them richer. The Bears were scarcely visible. The Great Bull in a single superb rush had driven them nearly out of the Pit. Growling, grumbling they had retreated, and only at distance dared so much as to bare a claw. Just the formidable lowering of the Great Bull's frontlet sufficed, so it seemed, to check their every move of aggression or resistance. And all the while, Liverpool, Paris, Odessa, and Buda-Pesth clamoured ever louder and louder for the grain that meant food to the crowded streets and barren farms of Europe.

A few moments before the opening Charles Cressler was in the public room, in the southeast corner of the building, where smoking was allowed, finishing his morning's cigar. But as he heard the distant striking of the gong, and the roar of the Pit as it began to get under way, with a prolonged rumbling trepidation like the advancing of a great flood, he threw his cigar away and stepped out from the public room to the main floor, going on towards the front windows. At the sample tables he filled his pockets with wheat, and once at the windows raised the sash and spread the pigeons' breakfast on the granite ledge.

While he was watching the confused fluttering of flashing wings, that on the instant filled the air in front of the window, he was all at once surprised to hear a voice at his elbow, wishing him good morning.

"Seem to know you, don't they?"

Cressler turned about.

"Oh," he said. "Hullo, hullo--yes, they know me all right. Especially that red and white hen. She's got a lame wing since yesterday, and if I don't watch, the others would drive her off. The pouter brute yonder, for instance. He's a regular pirate. Wants all the wheat himself. Don't ever seem to get enough."

"Well," observed the newcomer, laconically, "there are others."

The man who spoke was about forty years of age. His name was Calvin Hardy Crookes. He was very small and very slim. His hair was yet dark, and his face--smooth-shaven and triangulated in shape, like a cat's--was dark as well. The eyebrows were thin and black, and the lips too were thin and were puckered a little, like the mouth of a tight-shut sack. The face was secretive, impassive, and cold.

The man himself was dressed like a dandy. His coat and trousers were of the very newest fashion. He wore a white waistcoat, drab gaiters, a gold watch and chain, a jewelled scarf pin, and a seal ring. From the top pocket of his coat protruded the finger tips of a pair of unworn red gloves.

"Yes," continued Crookes, unfolding a brand-new pocket handkerchief as he spoke. "There are others--who never know when they've got enough wheat."

"Oh, you mean the 'Unknown Bull.'"

"I mean the unknown damned fool," returned Crookes placidly.

There was not a trace of the snob about Charles Cressler. No one could be more democratic. But at the same time, as this interview proceeded, he could not fight down nor altogether ignore a certain qualm of gratified vanity. Had the matter risen to the realm of his consciousness, he would have hated himself for this. But it went no further than a vaguely felt increase of self-esteem. He seemed to feel more important in his own eyes; he would have liked to have his friends see him just now talking with this man. "Crookes was saying to-day--" he would observe when next he met an acquaintance. For C. H. Crookes was conceded to be the "biggest man" in La Salle Street. Not even the growing importance of the new and mysterious Bull could quite make the market forget the Great Bear. Inactive during all this trampling and goring in the Pit, there were yet those who, even as they strove against the Bull, cast uneasy glances over their shoulders, wondering why the Bear did not come to the help of his own.

"Well, yes," admitted Cressler, combing his short beard, "yes, he is a fool."

The contrast between the two men was extreme. Each was precisely what the other was not. The one, long, angular, loose-jointed; the other, tight, trim, small, and compact. The one osseous, the other sleek; the one stoop-shouldered, the other erect as a corporal of infantry.

But as Cressler was about to continue Crookes put his chin in the air.

"Hark!" he said. "What's that?"

For from the direction of the Wheat Pit had come a sudden and vehement renewal of tumult. The traders as one man were roaring in chorus. There were cheers; hats went up into the air. On the floor by the lowest step two brokers, their hands trumpet-wise to their mouths, shouted at top voice to certain friends at a distance, while above them, on the topmost step of the Pit, a half-dozen others, their arms at fullest stretch, threw the hand signals that interpreted the fluctuations in the price, to their associates in the various parts of the building. Again and again the cheers rose, violent hip-hip-hurrahs and tigers, while from all corners and parts of the floor men and boys came scurrying up. Visitors in the gallery leaned eagerly upon the railing. Over in the provision pit, trading ceased for the moment, and all heads were turned towards the commotion of the wheat traders.

"Ah," commented Crookes, "they did get it there at last."

For the hand on the dial had suddenly jumped another degree, and not a messenger boy, not a porter not a janitor, none whose work or life brought him in touch with the Board of Trade, that did not feel the thrill. The news flashed out to the world on a hundred telegraph wires; it was called to a hundred offices across the telephone lines. From every doorway, even, as it seemed, from every window of the building, spreading thence all over the city, the State, the Northwest, the entire nation, sped the magic words, "Dollar wheat."

Crookes turned to Cressler.

"Can you lunch with me to-day--at Kinsley's? I'd like to have a talk with you."

And as soon as Cressler had accepted the invitation, Crookes, with a succinct nod, turned upon his heel and walked away.

At Kinsley's that day, in a private room on the second floor, Cressler met not only Crookes, but his associate Sweeny, and another gentleman by the name of Freye, the latter one of his oldest and best-liked friends.

Sweeny was an Irishman, florid, flamboyant, talkative, who spoke with a faint brogue, and who tagged every observation, argument, or remark with the phrase, "Do you understand me, gen'lemen?" Freye, a German-American, was a quiet fellow, very handsome, with black side whiskers and a humourous, twinkling eye. The three were members of the Board of Trade, and were always associated with the Bear forces. Indeed, they could be said to be its leaders. Between them, as Cressler afterwards was accustomed to say, "They could have bought pretty much all of the West Side."

And during the course of the luncheon these three, with a simplicity and a directness that for the moment left Cressler breathless, announced that they were preparing to drive the Unknown Bull out of the Pit, and asked him to become one of the clique.