A Larger Commission than Fox and Fleecer Had Ever Received in One Deal

Of course in a matter so trifling Mr. Fox could not refuse so good a customer, and J. Rufus departed, well satisfied, to work and wait while Nature helped his plans.

Across a thousand miles of fertile land the spring rains fell and the life-giving sun shone down; from the warm earth sprang up green blades and tall shoots that through their hollow stems sucked the life of the soil, and by a transformation more wonderful than ever conceived by any magician, upon the stalks there swelled heads of grain that nodded and yellowed and ripened with the advancing summer. From the windows of Pullman cars, as he rode hither and yonder throughout this rich territory in the utmost luxury that travelers may have, J. Rufus Wallingford, the great liberator of farmers, watched all this magic of the Almighty with but the one thought of what it might mean to him. Back on the Wallingford farm, Blackie Daw and his staff of assistants, now half-a-dozen girls, kept up an ever-increasing correspondence. Ham Tinkle was jealous of the very night that hid his handiwork for a space out of each twenty-four hours, and begrudged the time that he spent in sleep. During every waking moment, almost, he was abroad in his fields, and led his neighbors, when he could, to see his triumph, for never had the old Spicer farm brought forth such a yield, and nowhere in Truscot County or in Mapes County could such fields be shown. Upon these broad acres the wheat was thicker and sturdier, the heads longer and larger and fuller of fine, fat grain than anywhere in all the region round.

The Farmers' Commercial Association, a "combination in restraint of trade" which was well protected by the fear-inspiring farmer vote, met monthly, and Wallingford ran in to the meetings as often as he could, though there was no need to sustain their enthusiasm; for not only was the plan one of such tremendous scope as to compel admiration, but Nature and circumstances both were kind. There came the usual early rumors of a drought in Kansas, of over-much rotting rain in the Dakotas, of the green bug in Oklahoma, of foreign wars and domestic disturbances, and these things were good for the price of wheat, as they were exaggerated upon the floors of the great boards of trade in Chicago and New York. Through these causes alone September wheat climbed from eighty-seven to ninety, to ninety-five, to a dollar, to a dollar-five; but in the latter part of July there came a new and an unexpected factor. Dollar-and-a-half wheat had been the continuous slogan of the Farmers' Commercial Association, and every issue of the Commercial Farmer had dwelt upon the glorious day when that should be made the standard price. Now, in the mid-July issue, the idea was driven home and the entire first page was given up to a great, flaming advertisement:

HOLD YOUR WHEAT!
SEPTEMBER WHEAT WILL GO TO
$1.50!
DON'T SELL A BUSHEL OF IT FOR LESS!

The result was widespread and instantaneous. In Oklahoma a small farmer drove up to the elevator and asked:

"What's wheat worth to-day?"

"A dollar, even," was the answer.

"This is all you get from me at that price," said the farmer, "and you wouldn't get this if I didn't need fifty dollars to-day. Take it in."

"Think wheat's going higher?" asked the buyer.

"Higher! It's going to a dollar and a half," boasted the farmer. "I got twelve hundred bushels at home, and nobody gets it for a cent less than eighteen hundred dollars."

"You'd better see a doctor before you drive back," advised the elevator man, laughing.

Over in Kansas at one of the big collecting centers the telephone bell rang.

"What's cash wheat worth to-day?"

"Dollar-one."

"A dollar-one! I'll hold mine a while."

"Better take this price while you can get it," advised the shipper. "Big crop this year."

"A dollar and a half's the price," responded the farmer on the other end of the wire.

"Who is this?" asked the shipper.

"J. W. Harkness."

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."

"So's mine," exulted Hiram. "Paid a dollar-twenty-six, but I'm satisfied. When it reaches a dollar-forty I'll quit."

Ezekiel Tinkle walked six miles to see his son Ham at the Wallingford place.

"Jonas Whetmore's bragging about two thousand dollars he's made in a few days in this wheat business," he stated. "I don't rightly understand it, Hamlet. How about it? I don't believe in speculating, but Jonas says this ain't speculating, and if there's such a lot of money to be made I want some."

"We all do," laughed Ham Tinkle, who, since he had "made good" with his new-fangled farming, was accepted as an equal by his father. "I had two hundred when I started. It's a thousand now, and will be five thousand before I quit. Bring your money to me, father, and I'll show you how to get in on the profits. But hurry. How much can you spare?"

"Well," figured Ezekiel, "there's that fifteen hundred I've saved up for Bobbie's schooling; then when I sell my wheat——"

"Don't do that!" interposed his son quickly. "Wheat is going up so rapidly because the growers are holding it for a dollar and a half. Every man who sells his now, weakens the price that much."

"Is that the way of it!" exclaimed the old man, enlightened at last, and he kicked reflectively at a piece of turf. "To make money out of this all the farmers must hold their wheat for a dollar and a half! Say, Hamlet; Charlie Granice sold his wheat at a dollar-six to go into this thing. Adam Spooner and Burt Powers and Charlie Dorsett all sold theirs, and they're all members of this association. Ham, I'm going right home to sell my wheat."

"They are traitors!" charged Hamlet angrily. "I won't send that money away for you."

"Send it away!" retorted the old man. "Not by a danged sight you won't! I'll sell my wheat right now while it's high, and put my money in the bank along with the fifteen hundred I've got there; and you go ahead and be your own fool. I know advice from your old daddy won't stop you."

Not many, however, were like old man Tinkle, and J. Rufus Wallingford, as he sped toward Chicago, was more self-congratulatory than he had ever been in all his life. A million dollars! A real million! Why, dignity could now attach to the same sort of dealing that had made him forever avoid the cities where he had "done business." Heretofore his operations had been on such a small scale that they could be called "common grafting," but now, with a larger scope, they would be termed "shrewd financiering." It was entirely a matter of proportion. A million! Well, he deserved a million, and the other millions that would follow. Didn't he look the part? Didn't he act it? Didn't he live it?

"Me for the big game!" he exulted. "Watch me take my little old cast-iron dollars into Wall Street and keep six corporations rotating in the air at one and the same time. Who's the real Napoleon of Finance? Me; Judge Wallingford, Esquire!"

"Pull the safety-rope and let out a little gas, J. Rufus," advised Blackie Daw dryly. "Your balloon will rip a seam. The boys on Wall Street were born with their eye-teeth cut, and eat marks like you before breakfast for appetizers."

J. Rufus only laughed.

"They'd be going some," he declared. "Any wise Willie who can make a million farmers jump in to help him up into the class of purely legitimate theft, like railroad mergers and industrial holding companies, ought to be able to stay there. The manipulator that swallows me will have a horrible stomachache."

Mrs. Wallingford had listened with a puzzled expression.

"But I don't understand it, Jim," she said. "I can see why you got the farmers together to raise the price of wheat. It does them good as well as you. But why have you worked so hard to make them speculate?"

J. Rufus looked at her with an amused expression.

"My dear infant," he observed; "when Fox & Fleecer got ready to sell my near-two-million bushels of wheat this morning, somebody had to be ready to buy them. I provided the buyers. That's all."

"Oh!" exclaimed Mrs. Wallingford, and pondered the matter slowly. "I see. But, Jim! Mr. Hines, Mr. Evans, Mr. Whetmore, Mr. Granice, and the others—to whom do they sell after they have bought your wheat?"

"The sheriff," interposed Blackie with a grin.

"Not necessarily," Wallingford hastened to contradict him in answer to the troubled frown upon his wife's brow. "My deal don't disturb the market, and I expect wheat to go on up to at least a dollar and a half. If these farmers get out on the way up they make money. But the boobs who buy from them——"

"Ain't it funny?" inquired Blackie plaintively. "There's always a herd of 'em just crazy eager to grab the hot end."

A boy came on the train with evening papers containing the closing market quotations. Wheat had touched thirty-four, but a quick break had come at the close, back to twenty-six! Another column told why. Every cent of advance in the actual grain had brought out cash wheat in floods. Members of the great Farmers' Commercial Association had hurried their holdings to market, trusting to the great body of the loosely bound organizations to keep up the price—and the great body of the organization was doing precisely the same thing. At bottom they had, in fact, small faith in it, and the Board of Trade, sensitive as a barometer, was quick to feel this psychological change in the situation. Wallingford said nothing of this to his wife. He had begun to fear her. Always she had set herself against actual dishonesty, and more so than ever of late as he had begun to pride himself upon being a great financier. In the smoking compartment, however, he handed the paper to Blackie Daw, with his thumb upon the quotations.

"There's the answer," he said. "The Rubes have cut their own throats, as I figured they would, and you'll see wheat tumble to lower than it was when this raise began. Hines and Evans and Granice and the rest of them will hold the bag on this deal, and they needn't blame it to me. They can only blame it to the fact that farmers won't stick. I'm lucky that they hung together long enough to reach my price of a dollar and a quarter."

"How do you know you got out?" asked Blackie, passing over as a matter of no moment whatever the fact that all their neighbors of Truscot and Mapes Counties, who had followed "Judge" Wallingford's lead and urging in the matter of speculation, would lose their all; as would hundreds if not thousands of other "members" who had been led through the deftly worded columns of the Commercial Farmer to gamble in their own grain.

"Easy," explained J. Rufus. "The quotations themselves tell it. Fox & Fleecer had instructions to unload at a dollar twenty-five, and they follow such instructions absolutely. They began unloading at that price, buying in at the same time for my farmers, and, in spite of the fact that they were pitching nearly two million bushels of wheat on the market after it hit the twenty-five mark, it went on up to thirty-four before it broke, showing that the buying orders until that time were in excess of selling orders. The farmers throughout the country simply ate up my two million bushels of wheat."

"Then it's their money you got, after all," observed Blackie.

"It's mine now," responded J. Rufus with a chuckle. "I saw it first."