“Heavens and earth, J.,” exclaimed Gretry, with a long breath, “the risk is about as big as holding up the Bank of England. You are depreciating the value of about forty million dollars’ worth of your property with every cent she breaks.”
“You do as I tell you—you’ll see I’m right,” answered Jadwin. “Get your boys in here, and we’ll give ’em the day’s orders.”
The “Crookes affair”—as among themselves the group of men who centred about Jadwin spoke of it—was one of the sharpest fights known on the Board of Trade for many a long day. It developed with amazing unexpectedness and was watched with breathless interest from every produce exchange between the oceans.
It occupied every moment of each morning’s session of the Board of Trade for four furious, never-to-be-forgotten days. Promptly at half-past nine o’clock on Tuesday morning Crookes began to sell May wheat short, and instantly, to the surprise of every Pit trader on the floor, the price broke with his very first attack. In twenty minutes it was down half a cent. Then came the really big surprise of the day. Landry Court, the known representative of the firm which all along had fostered and encouraged the rise in the price, appeared in the Pit, and instead of buying, upset all precedent and all calculation by selling as freely as the Crookes men themselves. For three days the battle went on. But to the outside world—even to the Pit itself—it seemed less a battle than a rout. The “Unknown Bull” was down, was beaten at last. He had inflated the price of the wheat, he had backed a false, an artificial, and unwarrantable boom, and now he was being broken. Ah Crookes knew when to strike. Here was the great general—the real leader who so long had held back.
By the end of the Friday session, Crookes and his clique had sold five million bushels, “going short,” promising to deliver wheat that they did not own, but expected to buy at low prices. The market that day closed at ninety-five.
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 tomorrow 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! A half!” 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
