pinch of famine made itself felt among the vine dressers of Northern
Italy, the coal miners of Western Prussia. Or another channel
filled, and the starved moujik of the steppes, and the
hunger-shrunken coolie of the Ganges' watershed fed suddenly fat and
made thank offerings before ikon and idol.

There in the centre of the Nation, midmost of that continent that
lay between the oceans of the New World and the Old, in the heart's
heart of the affairs of men, roared and rumbled the Pit. It was as
if the Wheat, Nourisher of the Nations, as it rolled gigantic and
majestic in a vast flood from West to East, here, like a Niagara,
finding its flow impeded, burst suddenly into the appalling fury of
the Maelstrom, into the chaotic spasm of a world-force, a primeval
energy, blood-brother of the earthquake and the glacier, raging and
wrathful that its power should be braved by some pinch of human
spawn that dared raise barriers across its courses.

Small wonder that Cressler laughed at the thought of cornering
wheat, and even now as Jadwin crossed Jackson Street, on his way to
his broker's office on the lower floor of the Board of Trade
Building, he noted the ebb and flow that issued from its doors, and
remembered the huge river of wheat that rolled through this place
from the farms of Iowa and ranches of Dakota to the mills and
bakeshops of Europe.

"There's something, perhaps, in what Charlie says," he said to
himself. "Corner this stuff--my God!"

Gretry, Converse & Co. was the name of the brokerage firm that
always handled Jadwin's rare speculative ventures. Converse was dead