he restraining clasps, thrust
the men to one side, and rushed from the room.

Gretry dropped into his chair before his desk.

"It's the end," he said, simply.

He drew a sheet of note paper to him, and in a shaking hand wrote a
couple of lines.

"Take that," he said, handing the note to the senior clerk, "take that
to the secretary of the Board at once."

And straight into the turmoil and confusion of the Pit, to the scene of
so many of his victories, the battle ground whereon again and again,
his enemies routed, he had remained the victor undisputed, undismayed
came the "Great Bull." No sooner had he set foot within the entrance to
the Floor, than the news went flashing and flying from lip to lip. The
galleries knew it, the public room, and the Western Union knew it, the
telephone booths knew it, and lastly even the Wheat Pit, torn and
tossed and rent asunder by the force this man himself had unchained,
knew it, and knowing stood dismayed.

For even then, so great had been his power, so complete his dominion,
and so well-rooted the fear which he had inspired, that this last move
in the great game he had been playing, this unexpected, direct,
personal assumption of control struck a sense of consternation into the
heart of the hardiest of his enemies.

Jadwin himself, the great man, the "Great Bull" in the Pit! What was
about to happen? Had they been too premature in their hope of his
defeat? Had he been preparing some secret, unexpected manoeuvre? For a
second they hesitated, then moved by a common impulse, feeling the push
of the wonderful new harvest behind them, they gathered themselves
together for the final assault, and again offered the wheat for sale;
offered it by thousands upon thousands of bushels; poured, as it were,
the reapings of entire principalities out upon the floor of the Board
of Trade.

Jadwin was in the thick of the confusion by now. And the avalanche, the
undiked Ocean of the Wheat, leaping to the lash of the hurricane,
struck him fairly in the face.

He heard it now, he heard nothing else. The Wheat had broken from his
control. For months, he had, by the might of his single arm, held it
back; but now it rose like the upbuilding of a colossal billow. It
towered, towered, hung poised for an instant, and then, with a thunder
as of the grind and crash of chaotic worlds, broke upon him, burst
through the Pit and raced past him, on and on to the eastward and to
the hungry nations.

And th