Chapter IX

THAT evening Dreadwind called.

Their rooms were on the top floor of one of those very old brick-wall buildings that have still enough economic life left to pay taxes while the land continues to increase in value for the steel structures that will ultimately dispossess them. The entrance lay between haberdashery and musical instruments. The character of the tenantry above was indicated by tin signs and placards on the walls of the hallway and on the stair risers—a painless dental parlor, a manufacturer of sporting novelties, a banjo teacher, a job printer, Prof. Ranjit, presumably a vender of bottled darkness, and so on. At the top of each stairway was a low-burning gas jet. The place was very still. The uppermost floor, which was the fourth, had the appearance of being unoccupied until Dreadwind saw far back a light showing through a transom. There he knocked.

The response was not immediate. After several moments of silence light footsteps approached the door. The bolt clicked and Cordelia looked out. Seeing who it was she opened the door wide and said good evening.

What Dreadwind entered was evidently their kitchen, dining room and living room all in one. It was lighted by gas, burning in a single jet at the end of a pipe that came straight down from the ceiling and terminated in a snakish curve. A black iron sink in one corner. Some pieces of crockery on a painted shelf. On a box by the window a one-burner gas stove, the flame at low duty under a kettle of water. On the window ledge outside milk bottles and food parcels. That was the larder. They had just dined on milk, bread, cheese and stewed prunes. The things had not been cleared off the table, which was covered with checkered oilcloth. Two wooden chairs were a little pushed back from it. The walls were decorated in a startling way with three-color advertising posters, fine half-tone impressions in black and white, and innumerable miscellany of the printing art—pasted to the wall with no thought of symmetry, order or agreement. Once this had been a job pressroom. There was an odor of printer’s ink, chemicals, strange incense, dried paste and closed plumbing.

Under the gas light in a folding canvas chair sat Weaver. A dish of coffee was on the floor beside him. His knees were as high as his face. Open on one knee, as it were a pulpit-stand, lay the book he was reading—Paracelsus Theophrastus Bombastus in Latin.

“Even to his habitation will ye seek and come,” he said, looking at Dreadwind. That was his salutation.

“I have an errand with you,” said Dreadwind.

“He has an errand,” the old man retorted. “No doubt he has an errand. That which is smoke is the mercurial principle. That which burns is the sulphurous principle. What remains is the ash.” He was so pleased with this delphic saying that he remembered the uses of hospitality. “Will you break bread with us?” he asked.

Cordelia gave Dreadwind an expectant look and stood poised, with an arm already reached out toward the things she would prepare if he should say yes.

“Another time, if you will ask me,” he said.

“Some coffee, then. Bring him a dish of coffee, ye mercurial principle.”

She moved to do this; but Dreadwind declined again.

“My errand is with you alone,” he said to Weaver.

“Leave us, Cordelia,” said the old man.

He put his book face down on his knee, brought his ten finger tips together and gazed over them fixedly at Dreadwind, who, when Cordelia was gone, sat on one of the wooden chairs, facing him.

“So you are the evil spirit one hears of in the wheat fields,” said Dreadwind in a low tone. “Father Rust himself. The killer of wheat.”

There was a hardening of Weaver’s expression from a change in his eyes; nothing else. He did not move, but continued to gaze steadily at his acuser.

“That bag you dropped the morning I surprised you by the roadside—I know what was in it,” said Dreadwind. “The seed of rust. Enough to have killed half the wheat in Kansas.”

The old man’s eyes did not flinch.

“I might deliver you to the law,” said Dreadwind, and waited.

“You might,” said Weaver thoughtfully. “You might do that very thing. If it worries thee thou shouldst.”

“I don’t intend to,” said Dreadwind.

“I know you don’t intend to,” said Weaver.

“However,” said Dreadwind, “I’m not the only person who knows what you’ve been sowing on the wind. I couldn’t have found out without letting others know. I mean that no matter what I intend to do the law may find you out.”

“It may,” said the old man. “That is quite possible. Even so.”

His voice was calm, quite level, with a note of taunting in it. Dreadwind was baffled. He regarded the old man with wonder. Could he be blind to the enormity of his offense? Was he a monster then? Or had he in him some deformed, fanatical conviction by which he justified his acts? In any respect, what a fatalist he was!

“You must see the implications,” said Dreadwind. “They are damning. In one personality you go about the country casting death upon the wheat, pretending all the time to love and cherish it. In another personality you are a gambler in Chicago betting on the price to rise. First, you destroy the food itself; then you seek to profit by that wickedness. The more you kill with rust the scarcer wheat will be and the higher it will rise. That’s how any jury on earth would see it. I can’t help seeing it that way myself.”

There it was all naked. They looked at each other for a whole minute. Then in a low tone Weaver said: “Pretend is a strong word. A heinous word. I cannot forgive it.”

That one word he seized upon. Evidently nothing else in the accusation had hurt at all.

“You have been doing this now for a long time,” said Dreadwind, as if he knew it. There was no denial. “For years,” he added. Still no sign or gesture of denial. He continued relentlessly. “Each year the new wheat runs to meet you. Do you remember? Silly wheat! How easily you deceive it! Or perhaps it cannot imagine treachery. Is that it? And yet it knows. When you come with your sack of plague it knows. I saw that too. I saw it turn and run from you in terror.”

He had touched the thing at last.

With a singular continuous effort Weaver rose. For a moment he stood poised in a menacing attitude, looking down at Dreadwind. Then he put his hands behind him and began to walk, in a blind, trampling way, precisely as he had walked through the wheat that morning. The chair capsized and was propelled aside as if it were invisible and without weight. His book was trodden underfoot. The dish of coffee overturned and he did not see it. These sounds brought Cordelia to the door. He did not see her, either. She stood looking from one to the other with a curious, unfrightened expression. Dreadwind now was standing. Suddenly the old man stopped and faced him.

“What will you have of me?” he asked.

“Your reasons,” said Dreadwind.

“You spoke of the farmers,” said Weaver.

“I did not,” said Dreadwind.

“You said they would hang me.”

“I did not,” said Dreadwind.

“You said what was true. They would,” said Weaver. “They would hang me with a hempen rope. But they hang themselves, they hang each other, with a rope they cannot see, a rope that does not exist. It’s name is surplus. Reasons—what? Reasons? There is only one. I did not make it. Nor do I understand it. Tell me if you do. Tell me why less brings more than plenty. Why do seven bushels profit the farmer more than ten? If you know why that is then everything else is clear. You don’t know. Nobody knows. And why will the farmer grow ten instead of seven? The surplus, what is called the surplus—the rope that hangs him—it is in the last three bushels. Yet he will produce them. He cannot help it. He must keep that bargain I spoke of—his side of it—which is to defend wheat from its enemies and give it space; and wheat in its boundless gratitude hath overwhelmed him. Now what? Shall the farmer who produces plenty be destroyed by his own industry? Or——”

He paused, gazing all the time at Dreadwind, and when he spoke again his voice was altered.

“The wheat,” he said. “The wheat itself. You spoke of that.”

“I did,” said Dreadwind. “I spoke of that.”

“That I stretched forth my hand against it.”

“Yes,” said Dreadwind.

“Thou didst,” said Weaver, extending his arm and pointing his finger. At a certain intensity of personal feeling he went naturally to the archaic pronouns and his tones became sepulchral. Does it sound theatrical? But it was effective because the emotion required that mode of expression. “Abominably thou didst,” he continued. “And that of all things was the one thou shouldst not have spoken of—to me. I say again, if it troubles thee in thy mind thou shouldst tell it to the law. Sooner do that than speak of it again—to me.”

That was his period. It required an exit. There was always the possibility that he consciously dramatized such moments; but even if he did there was never anything false about the action. It expressed the deep and permanent phantasy of his being. That one has invented one’s own phantasy does not stultify the acting of it provided the invention to begin with was true to one’s nature. Weaver’s was. He lived a made-up tragedy, acted a self-assigned rôle, and yet it was all true.

Having made the period he groped his way to the door through imaginary darkness—toward the outer door through which Dreadwind had entered, the door in which Cordelia was standing. She moved to let him pass, turning her back to the jamb. For a while he paced the hallway, Cordelia watching him from the doorway. His steps gradually diminished. Then a door opened and closed and all was still. He had gone into his room, which opened off the hall separately, as all the rooms did.

With a glance at Dreadwind, Cordelia disappeared. He heard the same door open and close again. She was gone for perhaps fifteen minutes; and when she returned she made coffee and placed it before him in a yellow bowl, together with bread in the whole loaf and a large segment of cheese. He was to help himself. She did this all without speaking, as if she had done it before. Then she sat down at the end of the table and regarded him in a slow, musing manner, with no guise of defense or shyness.

“Will anything happen?” she asked.

“From what you heard us talking about just now?”

She nodded.

“No,” he answered. “I don’t think so. Do you remember I said I believed your father’s motive was better than mine had been? That was when you asked me, there by the wheat pit, if I did that too.”

“I remember,” she said.

“Well, I’m sure of it now,” he said. “Shall I tell you why?”

She shook her head. “A woman to her own understanding,” she said. “He taught me that,” she added with a sober smile.

“Your father is not looking so well,” said Dreadwind.

“He never does here,” she said. “And this time it’s worse with him. You see, always before he has lost—in the first week or ten days everything there was, only just enough to keep us through the winter. That made the winters very long for him. But this is different. Now he is winning. He doesn’t tell me. But I know it.”

“It doesn’t change your way of living,” said Dreadwind.

“No,” she said. “It isn’t that. We should not know how to live in any other way. He is different. I hardly know him.”

“How has he changed?” Dreadwind asked. “Does he talk of getting rich?”

“Rich?” she repeated. It was a strange word. “No,” she said, “I’m sure he never thinks of that. It’s something he will do to wheat. In the night he thinks he is still there—in that dreadful place—calling for wheat—buying it higher and higher——” She stopped her ears. “Then something happens. I don’t know what that is. He is breathless for a moment and then he cries, ‘Ten dollars a bushel for all you’ve got!’ Do you understand it?”

“It comes together,” he said. “Yes, I think I do.”

They talked like this for hours. The fact of themselves they took for granted in some extraordinary sense that neither of them paused to consider. They asked and answered questions in an artless, unreserved manner, exactly as if all these things had happened to them during a long separation.

She told him of her life with Weaver from the beginning, with apparently no thought of how preposterous the pattern of it was. Initio, that early winter night when she ran out of the door after him with her arctics flapping, a child of ten. He did not hear her; when she caught him by the coat, he picked her up, kissed her, set her down again and turned away, walking faster than before. She was puzzled for a moment and very desolate. She had made her choice. Everything in her little world she had cast away to follow him and apparently he did not want her.

She looked back at the house. Someone had closed the door. No one was calling. The light burned brightly in the kitchen window, as if nothing had happened. How often it had beckoned her home, saying, “Hurry! Hurry! Nothing will catch you, but do hurry!” And now it seemed not to know her. It had cut her off; and the house was strange. It did not occur to her to go back. She ran after her father again, a terror of loneliness clutching her heart. Overtaking him a second time she put her hand in his. He neither spoke nor looked at her; but she knew he wanted her; and thus they walked a long way without resting. For many days they walked when it was not too cold; when it was they lodged with strangers who treated them with aloof curiosity and called her little girl. Then they stopped for the winter at a place where he taught a country school.

In the spring they set out again, walking south to meet the harvest. This was the beginning of a tryst which they kept annually thereafter. In Texas they faced about and followed the sickle bar all the way to the Red River of the North. He worked as a harvest hand. She was too small to do anything. He took her education in hand. She could already read and write; but they had only two books. One was that volume of Paracelsus, the other was a small Bible; and these were of equal value. More had been luggage; and it was their way to live without impedimenta of any sort. There was never anything to carry. The clothes they wore and what they had in their pockets—that was all. At any moment they were free to rise and go.

He taught her in the rabbinical manner, through her ears. This method had notable merits. Classes had neither time nor place, no beginning and no end. They were continuous, opportune and always interesting. You got your Latin verbs with whatever it was you were doing, astronomy on starry nights, history on rainy days, literature to relieve the tedium of a day’s journey; botany, biology, chemistry and physics where and however the true phenomenon occurred in nature’s laboratory. Everything was explained as it happened and then related to all that was known before. And just as one began to think the garden of knowledge had been explored, then suddenly new vistas were opened, extending to the mysteries. He had been himself trained for the church and had, besides, a fine gift for teaching. Surely never before had a woman been so educated, and wholly to a man’s liking. Of the things women teach each other she knew very little, for she had few friendships and no intimacies among members of her own sex. And of the things a lover teaches she knew nothing at all.

So passed the three enchanted seasons—spring, summer, autumn—in a state of idyllic vagabondage. But the winter was a horrible nightmare. Then her world fell to pieces.

At first she did not understand why they came to the city in the wintertime. They lived in one room and she kept house on tiptoe. He would leave each morning shortly before nine and return at three; and if she was lonesome while he was absent, with no one to talk to and so much to be afraid of, it was even worse when he was there, though of course in another way. Their companionship ceased. He was gloomy, preoccupied, often ironic and irritable. She did not know what he did and could not bring herself to ask. She hardly dared, and besides, she dreaded to find out.

Still, one day she followed him to where he suddenly disappeared through a large doorway. She waited a long time and then, as he did not come out and as many people were continually passing both ways through the doorway, she thought perhaps it was some kind of thoroughfare and ventured far enough in to hear the wicked uproar that rises from the wheat pit—from any wheat pit, but especially from the one at the Open Board of Brokers.

She was terrified. Her first impulse was to rush in and find him and beg him to come away with her—back to their beautiful country where nothing like this could ever be. Instead, she ran all the way back to their room and crouched there until he returned. He noticed how strange she was and questioned her anxiously, but she avoided telling him what she had done.

That evening he was much more himself. The next morning he took her with him and left her with the woman at the tobacco stand just inside the door. Every day thereafter he took her with him. That was how it started; and now she went with him because he needed her. She would be afraid to let him go by himself, he was so unseeing, so unpresent among realities. She doubted whether he knew where they lived or could find his way home alone. He had long leaned upon her figuratively; now he was beginning to lean upon her actually, as they walked. That was only here, in the city, and more now than ever before. In the country he walked in his own strength.

And this for all these years had been the design of their lives together. The winters, ah, yes. They were not to be remembered. But always came spring again and with it the delightful wandering, with happiness running in their footsteps. They came to have a regular orbit. And as Weaver grew to be known among the people therein he worked less and less as a harvest hand until he ceased to do so at all, and became as one of the ancient magi, a man full of arts and knowledge, giving shrewd and profitable counsel to the wise, performing offices of sorcery for the superstitious, thus gradually assuming the character in which Dreadwind found him.

In a few years also Cordelia became helpful. She filled her apron in the harvest. Between them they gained a livelihood easily, and came each winter to Chicago with enough money to keep them in the way they were wont to subsist, and the moiety over that Weaver lost in the wheat pit.

“Last times make one a little sad,” she said. “Not that one would wish to go on and on forever. Only because it is the last time. I wonder why.”

“What was for the last time?” he asked.

“All the beautiful part,” she said. “That harvest was our last. Only the winter is left. I can’t see what will happen. Perhaps I don’t wish to see.”

“When did you begin to have this feeling?” he asked. “Suddenly, just now? Or has it been growing?”

“To everything we knew I said good-bye this year,” she answered.

“Places,” he said.

She nodded. “Places. Friendly things. Bits of scenery. Trees we had named and treated as people. A little church with a graveyard we came to one night in a dreadful storm. We saw it far off by the lightning and ran. The door was unlocked. We were there until morning. It was the first summer; and there he christened me Cordelia.”

“That was not the name you started with?”

“No. There in the church, with the thunder splitting itself on the steeple, he read King Lear to me. From memory, I mean. He knew it by heart. The church was dark. His voice filled it and echoed round. By the lightning flashes I could see him walking up and down the aisle. Then I knelt at the altar and he christened me Cordelia. Things like that,” she concluded.

“And a bench,” he wondered. “A certain round bench under an apple tree.”

She blushed; looking at him steadily. “That was not good-bye,” she said, “and Mrs. Purdy ought not to have told you.”

No more than that did they say of the affair of their hearts. I had almost said no nearer than that did they come to it. But it had no external relation. It existed like a third part of them. It was the fact implicit; explicit facts merely pertained to it. And so also with the fulfillment. That was to be long postponed and it did not matter. It was never their way to make words of their love.

Dreadwind was of Cordelia’s notion that Absalom Weaver’s orbit was broken. More than this, he had a sense of impending disaster. That was not surprising with the shape of facts in view. People thought Weaver was running on luck. Dreadwind knew better. The old man had got a gambling position in wheat that was fundamentally logical. He would undoubtedly push it to the last extreme. There was no foretelling the sequel. There was only the probability that it would be catastrophic. On reflection this seemed inevitable. There was no way of stopping him. Fear, self-interest, satiety, a sense of consequences to himself and others—such constraining modes of thought and feeling were lacking in him. He had a demonic end in view. He cared nothing for the temple. He denounced it. One could imagine that he wished to destroy it. To what might follow he was utterly indifferent.

The spectacle fascinated Dreadwind. With rapid strokes of imagination he gave it form and projection. It had an unpredictable dimension. In a game itself without limits a fanatic who knew no restraint had got the fatal hand. What if he should play it out? And there was no reason to suppose he would not. Only one of Dreadwind’s prescience would have sensed the possibilities. It is a fact that no one else did. How could the keepers of the great world wheat market have been attending properly to their business and watching at the same time for a mad comet to burst from the door of that mean little place across the street—the Open Board of Brokers—where nothing of primary importance could ever happen?

Afterward for a long time, you may remember, nobody quite believed it as it really was. Many thought Dreadwind was behind Weaver, had invested money in him, and was himself the daring principal. Circumstances gave some fictitious color to this belief, and as it was never denied by anyone who positively knew the truth it still persists in legend.

Dreadwind did of course stand by, for a reason that now comes clear. A romantic reason, you see. He could not avert the catastrophe. It would not have occurred to him to try. Cordelia was his true anxiety.

His way of standing by was literal. He took all the rooms across the hall, furnished them in one day, and moved in.

Weaver apparently was never consciously aware of this astonishing gesture. At least he never spoke of it. A good deal of the time he seemed insensible to his surroundings and what passed therein; or, waking to them suddenly, he either accepted them indifferently or treated them as having been long familiar.

In that way he accepted Dreadwind without question or curiosity. Cordelia got another wooden chair and made a third place at the end of the table. Weaver said nothing. Dreadwind came every evening and ate with them. Weaver sometimes spoke when the guest arrived and sometimes gave him no recognition other than to include him tacitly. Afterward he would sit under the gas jet, in his folding chair, with his dish of coffee on the floor, and read while Cordelia cleared the table, Dreadwind contentedly watching her. He would go on reading while they walked in the hall and sometimes he passed them silently on the way to his room.

Then one evening it pleased him to talk. A fly fell into his bowl of milk. He fished it out, dried its feet, sent it away, and a flood of discourse fell from him, beginning with the fly as a marvelous instance and dwelling at length upon the enigma of becoming and being in all things. He talked for an hour continuously. He was on his feet, looking at them, with a thought half out of his mind, when of a sudden his interest broke. He forgot what he had been saying, looked once or twice around, then turned abruptly and went to his room.

Not long after this Dreadwind one evening had dinner sent in from his rooms. Weaver sat perfectly still until the Japanese man had placed it on the table and was gone, under Dreadwind’s instructions not to remain to serve it.

“Would we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt when we sat by the fleshpots,” said Weaver; and asked for his bread and milk. Seeing they did not eat he added gently: “Empty sayings nourish old age. I am too fond of them. But all things are good, so ye eat not of darkness. Partake and mind not the lion who cheweth straw.”

But they never did it again.

There was no fault in his faculties. He became each day a little more unseeing, more indifferent to what went on around him, and his feet grew heavy and reluctant; but when he entered the pit his bodily vigor returned to him as from a draught of magic elixir; he recovered his full stature and with it his aggressive, saturnine manner; his mind was alert, sensitive and unerring. There his strength was. He used it up prodigally, exultingly, wasted it in excessive humors. And his power increased. He made no mistakes. Dreadwind and Cordelia watched him in silent wonder.

One day as they stood together in a corner of the room, looking on, a strange note rose out of the pit. It was nearly time for gambling to cease. Someone had called Weaver by name. Cordelia started. Then others began calling him by name, and presently many were intoning it rhythmically. The sound was boisterous and friendly, and one would have thought they were proud of him.

“What does it mean?” Cordelia asked.

“It’s a send-off,” said Dreadwind.

“Why that?” she asked.

“I’ve been on the point of telling you ever since I came in. I heard it outside and came around at once. This is his last day here. He has bought a membership on the Board of Trade. I suppose that was never heard of before—a man going to the Board of Trade from this place. And they are all a little excited about it.”

“He will go to the big wheat pit across the street—is that what you mean?” said Cordelia.

Dreadwind nodded. The closing gong had just sounded and they were giving the old man a regular hazing. All the reserve with which his manner had inspired them was broken down, now that he was leaving. They dragged him out of the pit, pulled his hat over his ears, tied his muffler in three hard knots, rumpled his garments, beat him, jostled him, and then all with one impulse they picked him up and carried him toward the door, cheering and shouting his name. He took it passively. Cordelia and Dreadwind rescued him at last. He walked off between them and never looked back.

One who had taken no part in the hazing and resembled a huge wading fowl stood in the doorway croaking: “He will be back.... He will be back.” Dreadwind looked at Cordelia to see if she heard. She was shaking her head.

That evening Dreadwind referred to the change. “May I introduce you to the wheat pit?” he asked.

“I washed my steps in butter and the rock poured me forth oil,” Weaver answered. From which Dreadwind understood that he wished to find his way alone.

He made his first appearance the next morning. Cordelia and Dreadwind watched from the gallery. He stood on the edge of the wheat pit and did nothing. Nobody noticed him overtly, and that was a kind of hazing. Generally a new member is tumbled about a bit just to develop the nature of his goat. Everyone knew who he was of course and eyed him surreptitiously. For three days he stood there on the edge of the maelstrom, doing nothing.

And it was a maelstrom really. Wheat was two dollars and fifty cents a bushel, and still rising.

Who dared to buy wheat at this great price?

None of the little gamblers. They were afraid. They sold it rather—sold it because they were afraid.

None of the big gamblers were buying it, either. They, too, were afraid, though for a different reason. The rise in the price of wheat was beginning to have an ominous social aspect. A public cry had been raised against the pit. It was widely believed that the principal Chicago gamblers, having bought the crop at much lower prices from the farmers, were now turning it into gold at the expense of the countries allied against Germany in a war which was about to become our war as well. This was wicked in itself and very repugnant to our sympathies; but at the same time the American bread eater was mulcted in a like manner. So the public believed. And it had been true. But all the big, respectable gamblers were now standing aside, fearful of an experience in the pillory of public opinion if the Government should act suddenly and catch them red-handed in the business of profiteering.

And yet the price of wheat kept rising. Who bought it? Who was the reckless customer that went on buying it, regardless of the price of political consequences. Answer: WAR.

War was that kind of customer. Price was no object. The agents of France and Great Britain added each day millions of bushels to what the wheat pit called “that Eastern account.” The orders originated in New York, where the Allied Buying Commission sat.

But do you remember? This pit stuff is phantom wheat. Armies do not subsist upon imaginary food. Why did they buy that?

For this reason: That to a certain extent and under certain conditions phantom wheat bought in the pit may be converted into actual grain on the railroad track. If the seller of phantom wheat cannot, when called upon, deliver the actual grain he must settle in cash. So the buyer will get either the wheat itself or a profit in money. The Allied Commission was buying both phantom wheat and actual grain at the same time. This is to be remembered. It was running a corner such as had never been dreamed of in the world before—a corner in wheat at Chicago with the Bank of England behind it

There was yet one other heedless buyer.

On the fourth day Weaver went one step down into the pit and began to buy. On the fifth day he went another step down, still buying. On the sixth day he stood in the center and bought heavily. That was his regular place thereafter; and it came to be that he had a clear space around him, at the very core of the swirl, as it had been in the little wheat pit across the street, a figure for the eye to dwell upon. It came also that he was treated with awe and foreboding, like an event with no place in the probability of things.

Never here, as in that other pit, did he taunt the sellers or appear exulting. Why this was nobody knew. He was grim and silent. He would stand for sometimes an hour, motionless, gazing at the floor, at a distant object, or at Cordelia sitting always in the gallery with her regard upon him. Then of a sudden, with a sweeping look at the faces in the howling ring above him, he would lift his hands in signal and take all of that weighless, impalpable wheat they were willing to hurl down at him. No one ever saw him make a selling gesture. He never sold. And his profits were running wild, for the price knew not how to fall. Always he bought. Always it rose.

A few weeks after Weaver’s advent on the Board of Trade America put her fist in the war.

The price of wheat was then approaching three dollars a bushel. The public cry against the pit increased, and not without reason in morals, for of course if gamblers were manipulating the price of wheat for private greed that now was both unpatriotic and abominable. Dreadwind spoke to Weaver. How could he reconcile what he was doing with any sense of common duty? The old man took thought and answered slowly:

“The pit cannot grow one blade of grass. Neither can it destroy one grain of wheat. There is so much wheat. No more, no less. It is only the price.”

“But what of profiteering?” Dreadwind asked.

“So,” said Weaver. “What of it? Tell me of it. I have seen war before. I know what it’s lined and stuffed with. For once... you shall see... this time, I say... the spoils of war shall gild the wheat and nothing else. This is justice and I am its instrument. Its path shall be as a shining light.”

Came now the month of May. All the gambling was in May wheat. And on the eleventh day, which was Friday, the price touched three dollars and a quarter a bushel!

Minds were tense with dread. Men could not say what it was they dreaded; but something was about to happen. It was written in the air. The emeritus honorable J. P., guardian elephant of the wheat pit, walked round and round it saying, exhortively: “Boys, don’t touch it. For everybody’s sake let that May wheat alone.”

And there in the center stood Weaver, from time to time lifting his hands and taking all the wheat above him. Almost no gambler would touch wheat to buy it. Many were still willing to sell it.

That was the day the two British members of the Allied Buying Commission who had been buying wheat with the Bank of England behind them arrived in Chicago to look things over.

I happened myself to know the illuminating particulars. Dreadwind did not. He knew only the outcome; I told him what is here to be set down.

This is what happened: When J. P. with his head wagging returned to his desk from walking round and round the wheat pit his telephone was ringing. The two British members of the Allied Buying Commission were invited to lunch at the Union League Club. Would J. P. come? Yes, he would come, he said, on two conditions. One was that the Federal District Attorney should be asked; the other was that he himself should be permitted to speak. Both conditions were accepted.

At the lunch, besides the two English wheat buyers, the Federal District Attorney and J. P., were seated all the great men of La Salle Street and all the lords of speculation in meat products and breadstuffs, including the bankers who kept unlimited credit at the disposal of Moberly’s Dearborn Grain Corporation, who owned it in fact, but who would not suffer themselves to be called speculators. Anything else.

When the amenities were amiably exhausted J. P. rose.

“I want the Federal District Attorney to listen to this,” he said. “Wheat is three dollars and a quarter a bushel and going up. For this we are damned. The Board of Trade is damned. I am damned. Most of the eminent gentlemen sitting here are damned. Now I want to ask a few questions. You”—he pointed to the financier who was chairman of Moberly’s Dearborn Grain Corporation, calling his name—“have you got any May wheat?” The answer was no. One by one he called them, each in his name, and asked the same question, exhorting the Federal District Attorney to listen. The answer was invariably no. None of the great men of La Salle Street, none of the lords of speculation in meat products and breadstuffs, had any May wheat. They could not produce among them one kernel of it. “Now I ask myself,” said J. P., “I ask myself the same question. ‘Have you got any May wheat, J. P.?’ On my word I answer, ‘No, not a bushel.’ Now wait. I’m not through. I ask our English visitors, ‘Are you buying May wheat in the Chicago pit at this price?’ “

They denied it.

“Be that as it may,” said J. P. “I don’t believe all I hear. Just now as I was passing the pit a man took me aside to say he had bought another lot of May wheat for that Eastern account. Be that as it may—... What’s that?”

The English visitors interrupted him to say that if what he had heard were true it was merely the tail-end of some buying that had been ordered many days before.

“Be that as it may,” said J. P. again. “We haven’t come to the question yet. The question is: How much May wheat have you got?”

The Englishmen conferred aside and decided to react bluntly. They announced that they had nearly thirty millions of bushels.

“That’s as I thought it was,” said J. P. “Now then, I ask you all, what are we going to do? These gentlemen on their wheat-pit contracts are entitled to receive at the end of this month thirty million bushels of wheat in Chicago. Where is that wheat? The elevators are empty. We have only a handful or two. We cannot deliver this wheat. Why? Because it does not exist. If these gentlemen insist and we cannot deliver the wheat we shall have to pay them eight, nine, maybe ten dollars a bushel, anything they say, to let us off. We are sleeping on dynamite. Unless we can think of something to do we shall be blown up. The Board of Trade will blow up.”

It was the truth of arithmetic, and so very simple that no one realized it until J. P. had stated it in his naive way. The great men of La Salle Street and the lords of speculation were dazed. The English buyers, with the Bank of England behind them were politely sympathetic. What could they do? They had not been acting as individuals. They had nothing to win or lose. They had been buying wheat for the Allies. They wanted the wheat. If the people they had bought it from were unable to deliver it—well, that would be rather awkward, wouldn’t it? Yes, quite. That was to say, they had the wheat pit by what it sneezed with. When they were through there would be no wheat gamblers left in Chicago. Yes, one. His name would be Weaver.

But all the time the guardian elephant had a wicked light in his eye. He gathered together the great men of La Salle Street and all the lords of speculation in meat products and breadstuff, locked them into a room, and kept asking them one question: What were they going to do to save themselves? All the next day, which was Saturday, and all of the next, which was Sunday, they faced it; and they came at last, reluctantly, to the only answer there was.

They would shut the pit to May wheat. And anyone who had sold phantom wheat for May delivery and was unable on demand to produce it should be let off at a price to be determined by a special committee.

This had never been done before. In all the days of the Board of Trade, through panics and corners, it had never been done. Yet there was nothing else to do. “Unless you shut up,” said J. P., “you will blow up.” And that was true.

Dreadwind heard of this action before it was published.

He had been anxiously watching. After dinner Sunday evening he said to Cordelia: “Be not surprised at anything tomorrow.”

“Can you tell me?” she asked.

“I can tell you what will happen on the Board of Trade,” he said. “Nothing. A notice will be posted on the bulletin board. And that is what it will say. Nothing shall happen. How this will affect your father I cannot imagine.”

Five minutes before the opening of the pit on Monday morning Dreadwind joined Cordelia in the Board of Trade gallery. “I almost think it had been better to tell him,” he said. “There is still time.”

“No, wait,” she said.

They had decided the night before to let the event weave it own pattern.

At first there was apparently nothing strange in the scene below them. But as the minutes passed—one, two, three—anyone who knew how an excited wheat market should come open must have been extremely oblivious not to notice how wrong the omens were. Where were those with glinting eyes and tautened nerves who should now be massed within the pit, gathered on the rim of it, overflowing all around, ready at the sound of a gong to rip the air apart with sound? Where were those who should be running to and fro between the pit and every other point, bringing news and last instructions? One minute yet until the opening and the pit was hardly one-third full. The men already gathered were not tense and poised; they were dilatory and apathetic. They stood in little groups talking together. And on the dial above the pit where price changes are recorded was the sign of September wheat—S E P. Where was the sign of M A Y? Nobody was interested in September wheat. All the gambling was in May wheat. The great corner with the Bank of England behind it and Absalom Weaver astride of it was in May wheat.

And the sign of May had disappeared!

None of this had Weaver noticed. Both his mind and his eyes were in distant focus. He stood in his place at the center of the pit. Once he glanced uneasily at the clock and then at the thin fringe of men around him. Still he was not warned.

The gong struck.