pers and trade journals for? We'll begin sending out
reports to-morrow that'll discourage any big wheat planting."

"And then, too," went on Gretry, "here's another point. Do you know,
you ought to be in bed this very minute. You haven't got any nerves
left at all. You acknowledge yourself that you don't sleep any more.
And, good Lord, the moment any one of us contradicts you, or opposes
you, you go off the handle to beat the Dutch. I know it's a strain, old
man, but you want to keep yourself in hand if you go on with this
thing. If you should break down now--well, I don't like to think of
what would happen. You ought to see a doctor."

"Oh-h, fiddlesticks," exclaimed Jadwin, "I'm all right. I don't need a
doctor, haven't time to see one anyhow. Don't you bother about me. I'm
all right."

Was he? That same night, the first he had spent under his own roof for
four days, Jadwin lay awake till the clocks struck four, asking himself
the same question. No, he was not all right. Something was very wrong
with him, and whatever it might be, it was growing worse. The sensation
of the iron clamp about his head was almost permanent by now, and just
the walk between his room at the Grand Pacific and Gretry's office left
him panting and exhausted. Then had come vertigoes and strange,
inexplicable qualms, as if he were in an elevator that sank under him
with terrifying rapidity.

Going to and fro in La Salle Street, or sitting in Gretry's office,
where the roar of the Pit dinned forever in his ears, he could forget
these strange symptoms. It was the night he dreaded--the long hours he
must spend alone. The instant the strain was relaxed, the gallop of
hoofs, or as the beat of ungovernable torrents began in his brain.
Always the beat dropped to the same cadence, always the pulse spelled
out the same words:

"Wheat-wheat-wheat, wheat-wheat-wheat."

And of late, during the long and still watches of the night, while he
stared at the ceiling, or counted the hours that must pass before his
next dose of bromide of potassium, a new turn had been given to the
screw.

This was a sensation, the like of which he found it difficult to
describe. But it seemed to be a slow, tense crisping of every tiniest
nerve in his body. It would begin as he lay in bed--counting
interminably to get himself to sleep--between his knees and ankles, and
thence slowly spread to every part of him, creeping upward, from loin
to shoulder, in a gradual wave of t