ailures who sat on the chairs of the customers'
rooms day in and day out, reading old newspapers, smoking vile cigars.
And there were young men of the type of clerks and bookkeepers, young
men with drawn, worn faces, and hot, tired eyes, who pressed upward,
silent, their lips compressed, listening intently to the indefinite
echoing murmur that was filling the building.

For on this morning of the thirteenth of June, the Board of Trade, its
halls, corridors, offices, and stairways were already thrilling with a
vague and terrible sound. It was only a little after nine o'clock. The
trading would not begin for another half hour, but, even now, the
mutter of the whirlpool, the growl of the Pit was making itself felt.
The eddies were gathering; the thousands of subsidiary torrents that
fed the cloaca were moving. From all over the immediate neighborhood
they came, from the offices of hundreds of commission houses, from
brokers' offices, from banks, from the tall, grey buildings of La Salle
Street, from the street itself. And even from greater distances they
came; auxiliary currents set in from all the reach of the Great
Northwest, from Minneapolis, Duluth, and Milwaukee. From the Southwest,
St. Louis, Omaha, and Kansas City contributed to the volume. The
Atlantic Seaboard, New York, and Boston and Philadelphia sent out their
tributary streams; London, Liverpool, Paris, and Odessa merged their
influences with the vast world-wide flowing that bore down upon
Chicago, and that now began slowly, slowly to centre and circle about
the Wheat Pit of the Board of Trade.

Small wonder that the building to Page's ears vibrated to a strange and
ominous humming. She heard it in the distant clicking of telegraph
keys, in the echo of hurried whispered conversations held in dark
corners, in the noise of rapid footsteps, in the trilling of telephone
bells. These sounds came from all around her; they issued from the
offices of the building below her, above her and on either side. She
was surrounded with them, and they mingled together to form one
prolonged and muffled roar, that from moment to moment increased in
volume.

The Pit was getting under way; the whirlpool was forming, and the sound
of its courses was like the sound of the ocean in storm, heard at a
distance.

Page and Landry were still halfway up the last stairway. Above and
below, the throng was packed dense and immobilised. But, little by
little, Landry wormed a way for them,