“Oh, I am sure you two will hit upon a plan. When I told Tom this morning of the scheme I have just outlined to you he scoffed at me; but you see its feasibility, don’t you?”
“Yes, I think I do. Anyhow, Tom and I will consult this afternoon about it, and he’ll let you know at what decision we arrive.”
He shook hands with his visitor and was very glad to see her depart.
“Good gracious!” he said to himself when the door was shut, “how fatuously silly she is! And to think that a little more than a year ago I proposed to her! Poor girl! Beauty almost gone, too, at the first whiff of trouble. Still, the situation is serious enough; but it is easier to refuse a man than a woman. I’ll tell Tom what I think of him when he comes. Imagine the cursed fool marching into Chicago like a hayseed from the backwoods, and losing fifty thousand dollars inside of three weeks. What he needs is a guardian; yet I’d like to help the little woman, too, although I don’t see how I can. I wonder if wheat’s going any lower. Hold up, Jack, my boy, don’t get thinking about the price of wheat. That way madness lies. No, I’ll confine myself to giving Tom a piece of my mind when I see him which will make him angry, so we’ll quarrel, and then it’ll be easy to refuse him.”
At three o’clock the ex-station-master of Slocum Junction was shown into John Steele’s private office. His face was so gaunt and haggard that for a moment Steele felt sorry for him; but business is business, and sympathy has no place in the wheat-pit. Tom shook hands and sat down without a word; all his old jauntiness had left him.
“Well, my Christian friend,” began Steele in his severest manner, “when I was the means of getting you transferred from Slocum Junction to Chicago, and also had something to do towards endowing your wife-that-was-to-be with nearly fifty thousand dollars, hang me if I thought you would act the giddy farmer-come-to-town and blow it all away in the wheat-pit! God bless my soul! haven’t you sense enough to know that the biggest men in Chicago have been crumpled up in the grain-market? How could you expect to win where the richest and shrewdest dealers in the city have failed? Don’t you read the papers? Haven’t you any brains in your head at all? Is it only an intellectual bluff that you are putting up before the public, pretending to be a man of sense? Why, a ten-year-old boy born in Chicago would know better! Wheat may be the staff of life when it leaves the flour-mill, but it’s the cudgel of death in the speculative market!”
“So I’ve been told,” said Tom quietly.
“Well, you haven’t profited much by the telling. What in the name of all the saints made you speculate in wheat?”
“I didn’t speculate.”
“I understand you bought a million bushels?”