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 today—” 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 today—at Kinsley’s? I’d like to have a talk with you.”
And as soon as
