know that not a night passes that my little girl,
now going on seven, sir, and the brightest of her class in the county
seat grammar school, does not pray to have God bless Mister Jadwin, who
helped papa save the farm."

If there was another side, if the brilliancy of his triumph yet threw a
shadow behind it, Jadwin could ignore it. It was far from him, he could
not see it. Yet for all this a story came to him about this time that
for long would not be quite forgotten. It came through Corthell, but
very indirectly, passed on by a dozen mouths before it reached his ears.

It told of an American, an art student, who at the moment was on a
tramping tour through the north of Italy. It was an ugly story. Jadwin
pished and pshawed, refusing to believe it, condemning it as ridiculous
exaggeration, but somehow it appealed to an uncompromising sense of the
probable; it rang true.

"And I met this boy," the student had said, "on the high road, about a
kilometre outside of Arezzo. He was a fine fellow of twenty or
twenty-two. He knew nothing of the world. England he supposed to be
part of the mainland of Europe. For him Cavour and Mazzini were still
alive. But when I announced myself American, he roused at once.

"'Ah, American,' he said. 'We know of your compatriot, then, here in
Italy--this Jadwin of Chicago, who has bought all the wheat. We have no
more bread. The loaf is small as the fist, and costly. We cannot buy
it, we have no money. For myself, I do not care. I am young. I can eat
lentils and cress. But' and here his voice was a whisper--'but my
mother--my mother!'"

"It's a lie!" Jadwin cried. "Of course it's a lie. Good God, if I were
to believe every damned story the papers print about me these days I'd
go insane."

Yet when he put up the price of wheat to a dollar and twenty cents, the
great flour mills of Minnesota and Wisconsin stopped grinding, and
finding a greater profit in selling the grain than in milling it, threw
their stores upon the market. Though the bakers did not increase the
price of their bread as a consequence of this, the loaf--even in
Chicago, even in the centre of that great Middle West that weltered in
the luxury of production--was smaller, and from all the poorer
districts of the city came complaints, protests, and vague grumblings
of discontent.

On a certain Monday, about the middle of May, Jadwin sat at Gretry's
desk (long since given over to his use), in the office on the ground
floor