"
When the other had taken himself off, Hornung sat for some moments
gazing abstractedly toward his office windows, thinking over the whole
matter. He had just agreed to release to Truslow, at the rate of one
dollar and ten cents per bushel, one hundred thousand out of the two
million and odd bushels of wheat that he, Hornung, controlled, or
actually owned. And for the moment he was wondering if, after all, he
had done wisely in not goring the Great Bear to actual financial death.
He had made him pay one hundred thousand dollars. Truslow was good for
this amount. Would it not have been better to have put a prohibitive
figure on the grain and forced the Bear into bankruptcy? True, Hornung
would then be without his enemy's money, but Truslow would have been
eliminated from the situation, and that--so Hornung told himself--was
always a consummation most devoutly, strenuously and diligently to be
striven for. Truslow once dead was dead, but the Bear was never more
dangerous than when desperate.
"But so long as he can't get _wheat_," muttered Hornung at the end of
his reflections, "he can't hurt me. And he can't get it. That I _know_."
For Hornung controlled the situation. So far back as the February of
that year an "unknown bull" had been making his presence felt on the
floor of the Board of Trade. By the middle of March the commercial
reports of the daily press had begun to speak of "the powerful bull
clique"; a few weeks later that legendary condition of affairs implied
and epitomized in the magic words "Dollar Wheat" had been attained, and
by the first of April, when the price had been boosted to one dollar and
ten cents a bushel, Hornung had disclosed his hand, and in place of mere
rumours, the definite and authoritative news that May wheat had been
cornered in the Chicago pit went flashing around the world from
Liverpool to Odessa and from Duluth to Buenos Ayres.
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