第55章

The months passed.Soon three years had gone by, and the third winter since the ceremony in St.James'

Church drew to its close.

Since that day when--acting upon the foreknowledge of the French import duty--Jadwin had sold his million of bushels short, the price of wheat had been steadily going down.From ninety-three and ninety-four it had dropped to the eighties.Heavy crops the world over had helped the decline.No one was willing to buy wheat.The Bear leaders were strong, unassailable.

Lower and lower sagged the price; now it was seventy-five, now seventy-two.From all parts of the country in solid, waveless tides wheat--the mass of it incessantly crushing down the price--came rolling in upon Chicago and the Board of Trade Pit.All over the world the farmers saw season after season of good crops.They were good in the Argentine Republic, and on the Russian steppes.In India, on the little farms of Burmah, of Mysore, and of Sind the grain, year after year, headed out fat, heavy, and well-favoured.In the great San Joaquin valley of California the ranches were one welter of fertility.All over the United States, from the Dakotas, from Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Illinois, from all the wheat belt came steadily the reports of good crops.

But at the same time the low price of grain kept the farmers poor.New mortgages were added to farms already heavily "papered"; even the crops were mortgaged in advance.No new farm implements were bought.Throughout the farming communities of the "Middle West there were no longer purchases of buggies and parlour organs.Somewhere in other remoter corners of the world the cheap wheat, that meant cheap bread, made living easy and induced prosperity, but in the United States the poverty of the farmer worked upward through the cogs and wheels of the whole great machine of business.It was as though a lubricant had dried up.The cogs and wheels worked slowly and with dislocations.Things were a little out of joint.Wall Street stocks were down.In a word, "times were bad."Thus for three years.It became a proverb on the Chicago Board of Trade that the quickest way to make money was to sell wheat short.One could with almost absolute certainty be sure of buying cheaper than one had sold.And that peculiar, indefinite thing known--among the most unsentimental men in the world--as "sentiment," prevailed more and more strongly in favour of low prices."The 'sentiment,'" said the market reports, "was bearish"; and the traders, speculators, eighth-chasers, scalpers, brokers, bucket-shop men, and the like--all the world of La Salle Street--had become so accustomed to these "Bear conditions," that it was hard to believe that they would not continue indefinitely.

Jadwin, inevitably, had been again drawn into the troubled waters of the Pit.Always, as from the very first, a Bear, he had once more raided the market, and had once more been succesful.Two months after this raid he and Gretry planned still another coup, a deal of greater magnitude than any they had previously hazarded.Laura, who knew very little of her husband's affairs--to which he seldom alluded--saw by the daily papers that at one stage of the affair the "deal"trembled to its base.

But Jadwin was by now "blooded to the game." He no longer needed Gretry's urging to spur him.He had developed into a strategist, bold, of inconceivable effrontery, delighting in the shock of battle, never more jovial, more daring than when under stress of the most merciless attack.On this occasion, when the "other side" resorted to the usual tactics to drive him from the Pit, he led on his enemies to make one single false step.Instantly--disregarding Gretry's entreaties as to caution--Jadwin had brought the vast bulk of his entire fortune to bear, in the manner of a general concentrating his heavy artillery, and crushed the opposition with appalling swiftness.

He issued from the grapple triumphantly, and it was not till long afterward that Laura knew how near, for a few hours, he had been to defeat.

And again the price of wheat declined.In the first week in April, at the end of the third winter of Jadwin's married life, May wheat was selling on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade at sixty-four, the July option at sixty-five, the September at sixty-six and an eighth.During February of the same year Jadwin had sold short five hundred thousand bushels of May.

He believed with Gretry and with the majority of the professional traders that the price would go to sixty.

March passed without any further decline.All through this month and through the first days of April Jadwin was unusually thoughtful.His short wheat gave him no concern.He was now so rich that a mere half-million bushels was not a matter for anxiety.It was the "situation" that arrested his attention.

In some indefinable way, warned by that blessed sixth sense that had made him the successful speculator he was, he felt that somewhere, at some time during the course of the winter, a change had quietly, gradually come about, that it was even then operating.The conditions that had prevailed so consistently for three years, were they now to be shifted a little? He did not know, he could not say.But in the plexus of financial affairs in which he moved and lived he felt--a difference.

For one thing "times" were better, business was better.