hands behind his back, waited immovably planted on his feet with all
the gravity of a statue, his eyes preternaturally watchful, keeping
Kelly--whom he had divined had some "funny business" on
hand--perpetually in sight. The Porteous trio--Fairchild, Paterson,
and Goodlock--as if unalarmed, unassailable, all but turned their
backs to the Pit, laughing among themselves.

The official reporter climbed to his perch in the little cage on the
edge of the Pit, shutting the door after him. By now the chanting of
the messenger boys was an uninterrupted chorus. From all sides of
the building, and in every direction they crossed and recrossed each
other, always running, their hands full of yellow envelopes. From
the telephone alcoves came the prolonged, musical rasp of the call
bells. In the Western Union booths the keys of the multitude of
instruments raged incessantly. Bare-headed young men hurried up to
one another, conferred an instant comparing despatches, then
separated, darting away at top speed. Men called to each other
half-way across the building. Over by the bulletin boards clerks and
agents made careful memoranda of primary receipts, and noted down
the amount of wheat on passage, the exports and the imports.

And all these sounds, the chatter of the telegraph, the intoning of
the messenger boys, the shouts and cries of clerks and traders, the
shuffle and trampling of hundreds of feet, the whirring of telephone
signals rose into the troubled air, and mingled overhead to form a
vast note, prolonged, sustained, that reverberated from vault to
vault of the airy roof, and issued from every doorway, every opened
window in one long roll of uninterrupted thunder. In the Wheat Pit
the bids, no longer obedient of restraint, began one by one to burst
out, like the first isolated shots of a skirmish line. Grossmann had