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A Deal in Wheat
by
“No wonder we couldn’t account for so much wheat. ”
“Bought it from us at one-ten, and made us buy it back—our own wheat—at one-fifty. ”
Hornung and his broker looked at each other in silence for a moment. Then all at once Hornung struck the arm of his chair with his fist and exploded in a roar of laughter. The broker stared for one bewildered moment, then followed his example.
“
;Sold! Sold!” shouted Hornung almost gleefully. “Upon my soul it’s as good as a Gilbert and Sullivan show. And we—Oh, Lord! Billy, shake on it, and hats off to my distinguished friend, Truslow. He’ll be President some day. Hey! What? Prosecute him? Not I. ”
“He’s done us out of a neat hatful of dollars for all that,” observed the broker, suddenly grave.
“Billy, it’s worth the price. ”
“We’ve got to make it up somehow. ”
“Well, tell you what. We were going to boost the price to one seventy-five next week, and make that our settlement figure. ”
“Can’t do it now. Can’t afford it. ”
“No. Here; we’ll let out a big link; we’ll put wheat at two dollars, and let it go at that. ”
“Two it is, then,” said the broker.
V. THE BREAD LINE
The street was very dark and absolutely deserted. It was a district on the “South Side,” not far from the Chicago River, given up largely to wholesale stores, and after nightfall was empty of all life. The echoes slept but lightly hereabouts, and the slightest footfall, the faintest noise, woke them upon the instant and sent them clamouring up and down the length of the pavement between the iron shuttered fronts. The only light visible came from the side door of a certain “Vienna" bakery, where at one o’clock in the morning loaves of bread were given away to any who should ask. Every evening about nine o’clock the outcasts began to gather about the side door. The stragglers came in rapidly, and the line—the “bread line,” as it was called—began to form. By midnight it was usually some hundred yards in length, stretching almost the entire length of the block.
Toward ten in the evening, his coat collar turned up against the fine drizzle that pervaded the air, his hands in his pockets, his elbows gripping his sides, Sam Lewiston came up and silently took his place at the end of the line.
Unable to conduct his farm upon a paying basis at the time when Truslow, the “Great Bear,” had sent the price of grain down to sixty-two cents a bushel, Lewiston had turned over his entire property to his creditors, and, leaving Kansas for good, had abandoned farming, and had left his wife at her sister’s boarding-house in Topeka with the understanding that she was to join him in Chicago so soon as he had found a steady job. Then he had come to Chicago and had turned workman. His brother Joe conducted a small hat factory on Archer Avenue, and for a time he found there a meager employment. But difficulties had occurred, times were bad, the hat factory was involved in debts, the repealing of a certain import duty on manufactured felt overcrowded the home market with cheap Belgian and French products, and in the end his brother had assigned and gone to Milwaukee.
Thrown out of work, Lewiston drifted aimlessly about Chicago, from pillar to post, working a little, earning here a dollar, there a dime, but always sinking, sinking, till at last the ooze of the lowest bottom dragged at his feet and the rush of the great ebb went over him and engulfed him and shut him out from the light, and a park bench became his home and the “bread line” his chief makeshift of subsistence.