第95章

Friday night, in Jadwin's room in the Grand Pacific, a conference was held between Gretry, Landry Court, two of Gretry's most trusted lieutenants, and Jadwin himself.Two results issued from this conference.One took the form of a cipher cable to Jadwin's Liverpool agent, which, translated, read: "Buy all wheat that is offered till market advances one penny." The other was the general order issued to Landry Court and the four other Pit traders for the Gretry-Converse house, to the effect that in the morning they were to go into the Pit and, making no demonstration, begin to buy back the wheat they had been selling all the week.Each of them was to buy one million bushels.Jadwin had, as Gretry put it, "timed Crookes to a split second," foreseeing the exact moment when he would make his supreme effort.

Sure enough, on that very Saturday Crookes was selling more freely than ever, confident of breaking the Bull ere the closing gong should ring.

But before the end of the morning wheat was up two cents.Buying orders had poured in upon the market.

The price had stiffened almost of itself.Above the indicator upon the great dial there seemed to be an invisible, inexplicable magnet that lifted it higher and higher, for all the strenuous efforts of the Bears to drag it down.

A feeling of nervousness began to prevail.The small traders, who had been wild to sell short during the first days of the movement, began on Monday to cover a little here and there.

"Now," declared Jadwin that night, "now's the time to open up all along the line _hard._ If we start her with a rush to-morrow morning, she'll go to a dollar all by herself."Tuesday morning, therefore, the Gretry-Converse traders bought another five million bushels.The price under this stimulus went up with the buoyancy of a feather.

The little shorts, more and more uneasy, and beginning to cover by the scores, forced it up even higher.

The nervousness of the "crowd" increased.Perhaps, after all, Crookes was not so omnipotent.Perhaps, after all, the Unknown Bull had another fight in him.

Then the "outsiders" came into the market.All in a moment all the traders were talking "higher prices."Everybody now was as eager to buy as, a week before, they had been eager to sell.The price went up by convulsive bounds.Crookes dared not buy, dared not purchase the wheat to make good his promises of delivery, for fear of putting up the price on himself higher still.Dismayed, chagrined, and humiliated, he and his clique sat back inert, watching the tremendous reaction, hoping against hope that the market would break again.

But now it became difficult to get wheat at all.All of a sudden nobody was selling.The buyers in the Pit commenced to bid against each other, offering a dollar and two cents.The wheat did not "come out." They bid a dollar two and a half, a dollar two and five-eighths;still no wheat.Frantic, they shook their fingers in the very faces of Landry Court and the Gretry traders, shouting: "A dollar, two and seven-eighths! A dollar, three! Three and an eighth! A quarter! Three-eighths! Ahalf!" But the others shook their heads.Except on extraordinary advances of a whole cent at a time, there was no wheat for sale.

At the last-named price Crookes acknowledged defeat.

Somewhere in his big machine a screw had been loose.

Somehow he had miscalculated.So long as he and his associates sold and sold and sold, the price would go down.The instant they tried to cover there was no wheat for sale, and the price leaped up again with an elasticity that no power could control.

He saw now that he and his followers had to face a loss of several cents a bushel on each one of the five million they had sold.They had not been able to cover one single sale, and the situation was back again exactly as before his onslaught, the Unknown Bull in securer control than ever before.

But Crookes had, at last, begun to suspect the true condition of affairs, and now that the market was hourly growing tighter and more congested, his suspicion was confirmed.Alone, locked in his private office, he thought it out, and at last remarked to himself:

"Somebody has a great big line of wheat that is not on the market at all.Somebody has got all the wheat there is.I guess I know his name.I guess the visible supply of May wheat in the Chicago market is cornered."This was at a time when the price stood at a dollar and one cent.Crookes--who from the first had managed and handled the operations of his confederates--knew very well that if he now bought in all the wheat his clique had sold short, the price would go up long before he could complete the deal.He said nothing to the others, further than that they should "hold on a little longer, in the hopes of a turn," but very quietly he began to cover his own personal sales--his share of the five million sold by his clique.Foreseeing the collapse of his scheme, he got out of the market; at a loss, it was true, but still no more than he could stand.If he "held on a little longer, in the hopes of a turn," there was no telling how deep the Bull would gore him.This was no time to think much about "obligations." It had got to be "every man for himself"by now.

A few days after this Crookes sat in his office in the building in La Salle Street that bore his name.It was about eleven o'clock in the morning.His dry, small, beardless face creased a little at the corners of the mouth as he heard the ticker chattering behind him.He knew how the tape read.There had been another flurry on the Board that morning, not half an hour since, and wheat was up again.In the last thirty-six hours it had advanced three cents, and he knew very well that at that very minute the "boys" on the floor were offering nine cents over the dollar for the May option--and not getting it.The market was in a tumult.He fancied he could almost hear the thunder of the Pit as it swirled.