The man rubbed his chin. Harkness owned five hundred acres of the best wheat land in Kansas.
In South Dakota, on the same day, two farmers who had brought in their wheat drove home with it, refusing the price offered with scorn. In Pennsylvania not one-tenth of the grain was delivered as on the same date a year before, and the crop was much larger. In Ohio, in Indiana, in Illinois, in Iowa, in Nebraska, all through the wheat belt began these significant incidents, and to brokers in Chicago and New York were wired startling reports from a hundred centers: farmers were delivering no wheat and were holding out for a dollar and a half!
"You can scare the entire Board of Trade black in the face with a Hallowe'en pumpkin," Wallingford had declared to Blackie Daw. "Say 'Boo!' and they drop dead. Step on a parlor match and every trader jumps straight up into the gallery. Four snowflakes make a blizzard, and a frost on State Street kills all the crops in Texas."
Results seemed to justify his summing up. On that day wheat jumped ten cents within the last hour before closing, and ten thousand small speculators who had been bearing the market, since they could see no good reason for the already high price, were wiped out before they had a chance to protect their margins. On the following day a special edition of the Commercial Farmer was issued. It exulted, it gloated, it fairly shrieked over the triumph that had already been accomplished by the Farmers' Commercial Association. The first minute that it had shown its teeth it had made for the farmers of the United States ten cents a bushel on four hundred million bushels of wheat! It had made for them in one hour forty million dollars net profit, and this was but the beginning. The farmers themselves, by standing together, had already raised the price of wheat to a dollar-fifteen, and dollar-and-a-half wheat was but a matter of a few days. On the boards of trade it would go even higher. There would be no stopping it. It would soar to a dollar and a half, to a dollar-seventy-five, to two dollars! Speculation was a thing ordinarily to be discouraged, yet under these circumstances the farmers themselves should reap the wealth that was now ripe. They should take out of "Wall Street" and La Salle Street their share of the money that these iniquitous centers of financial jugglery had taken from the agricultural interests of the country for these many years. They themselves knew now, by the events of one day, that the Farmers' Commercial Association was strong enough to accomplish what it had meant to accomplish, and now was the time to get into the market. It should be not only the pleasure and profit of every farmer, but the duty of every farmer, to hit the gamblers a fatal blow by investing every loose dollar, on safe and conservative margins, in this certain advance of wheat. On the last page of this issue of the Commercial Farmer appeared for the first time the advertisement of Fox & Fleecer, and copies went to a million wheat growers.
The response was many-phased. Farmers who were convinced of this logic, and those who were not, rushed their wheat to market at the then prevailing price, not waiting for the dollar and a half, but turning their produce into cash at once. To offset this sudden release of grain, buying orders poured into the markets, the same cash that had been received from the sale of actual wheat being put into margins upon fictitious wheat. Prices fluctuated in leaps of five and ten cents, and the pit went crazy. It was a seething, howling mob, tossing frenzied trades back and forth until faces were red and voices were hoarse; and the firm of Fox & Fleecer, long noted for its conservative dealing and almost passed by in the course of events, suddenly became the most important factor on the floor.
On the ticker that on the first of May he had installed in his now mortgaged house upon his mortgaged farm, Wallingford saw the price mount to a dollar and a quarter, drop to a dollar-eighteen, jump to a dollar-twenty-two, back to twenty, up to twenty-five, back to twenty-two, up to twenty-eight. This last quotation he came back into the room to see after he had on his hat and ulster, and while his automobile, carrying Blackie Daw and Mrs. Wallingford, was spluttering and quivering at the door. Then he started for Chicago, leaving his neighbors back home to keep his telephone in a continuous jingle.
Hiram Hines met Len Miller in the road, for example. Both were beaming.
"What's the latest about wheat?" asked Len.
"A dollar twenty-eight and seven-eighths," replied Hiram; "at least it was about an hour ago when I telephoned to Judge Wallingford's house. Suppose its climbing for a dollar-thirty by now. How much you got, Len?"
"Twenty thousand bushels," answered Len jubilantly. "Bought it at a dollar twenty-four on a five-cent margin, and got that much profits already, nearly. Raised a thousand dollars on my sixty acres and have made nearly a thousand on it in two weeks; with Judge Wallingford's own brokers, too."