Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 January 1892 — A THOUSAND BUSHELS SHORT. [ARTICLE]

A THOUSAND BUSHELS SHORT.

A Splurge In Wheat and What It Suggested to a Visitor. “70.” “70}.” The floor was a living hell. A seething, raving torrent of half-crazed men; a Babel of clamor; an air rent with wildly flung arms and hands. The street had gone mad. It was one of those sudden fits of fury that come after a long period of stagnation; the air trembles with the storm for a while; then the tempest, dying, leaves naught behind but the nerve-killing memory of it and the ruined lives that lie behind. This time it was wheat. The bulls were tossing it up viciously. The bears were grinding their teeth and waiting for the break to come. Would it come? The messenger boys were breathy less. The arms that were not flung skyward handed out orders and telegrams so rapidly that the wires could hardly carry them all. Fortunes were hanging on threads, threads of wire; the Western Union was making money, whether it was bull or bear that won. Ah! That was a cable that time. “London selling.” “70.” “69}.” The pit became more like a witch’s caldron than ever. Blood-purple faces, blue-swelling veins, hoarse, inarticulate yells, uncouth, joint-loos-ening gestures—all the animal things in man most patent. Saw you ever the tigers fed in the Zoological? Bah —a very gentle sight to this. “69 J.”

The bears yelled louder. The market was bending to them. It was, with many of them, a fortune either way. It was the battle for wealth crowded into hours; many drag it through a lifetime. But all the fierceness of a life’s struggle was essential here. “69 J.” “69}.” “70.” The bulls leap in very frenzy of glee. It was another cable from London. “Strong buying tendency.” Then advices of a panic in the West—wheat rising like a kite. The bears began to waver. The “shorts” trembled. It was the bulls’ opportunity—to become rich suddenly. To break others—no matter. “70}.” “70J.” The climb began. The fractions were despised. The jumps were by cents. If it had been hell on the floor before it was a greater inferno now. The shorts turned pale. But they still fought. Grim, savage, desperate, bloodless. It was no use.- The price went up steadily as the thermometer toward a summer noop. There was a fever in the West, and it was contagious—by wire. Mow it was “80.”

Would the clock never strike the closing hour? Mo; there were fortunes to be made; lives to be ruined. For the wheat itself, who cared? It was the same wheat all the while, but “90.” Still upward. “$1.00.” J>aff! There is a little ring of smoke in ope corner, and under it there is a dead man, with a fuming pistol hanging to a limp hand. The crowd surges that way a little. “Corbridge,” says some one; “he was a good many thousand bushels short. It’ll be hardish on his family. ” “$1.01.” And the market closes.—Chicago Tribune.