Nobody paid any attention whatever to the personality of William Bradhurst, who studiously kept himself in the background and watched with the most profound interest and admiration the working out of the gigantic deal by his young friend.
“You’re a wonder, Vance,” he said to the boy one day as the two were getting ready to go to dinner. “A born speculator. Why, I haven’t seen you ruffled a bit since you took hold of this thing.”
“Yet it takes every minute of my time,” replied Vance, with a smile that covered the weariness inseparable from the control of the tremendous forces latent in a line of fifty million bushels of corn.
“Necessarily,” admitted the millionaire, “but, boy, you are stronger, bigger and shrewder than the great bear clique pitted against you. You’ve overtopped the whole crowd—the biggest men of the Board of Trade. A few days more will show the world that you are really the new corn Monte Christo. A few days more and these bears will wake up to the fact that the corn they have promised to deliver before they had it in hand is not to be got, except from you—and at the price you choose to impose. Jarrett, Palmer, Carrington, and others, not to speak of your dear friends, Jarboe, Willicutt & Co., will have to pay or go bankrupt.”
“Good gracious, Mr. Bradhurst! That can have only one meaning.”
“Exactly. You will actually have cornered the product.”
“I can’t realize it,” said Vance, pressing his hand to his head. “And yet that is the very point I have been aiming for. I am in it now up to my neck—both of us are. Were we beaten at this stage you would be absolutely ruined. And yet I have never for a moment seen you weaken when I called for million after million of your money. Do you actually realize to what extent I have involved you?”
“I do,” replied William Bradhurst coolly. “But I entered this affair on the principle of the whole hog or none. To do otherwise was to invite disaster. No halfway measures will answer in a deal of this kind. You must risk all or better stay out.”
“That’s right. I fear that even Mr. Whitemore would never have succeeded in doing what we have done. We have half his capital at our back as it is.”
“By the way, how is Mr. Whitemore now?”