up capital had been approximately eleven
thousand dollars of which over seven thousand had been required for
organization outlay. The number of shareholders had nearly doubled
during the ten months and everything was pointing to rapid advancement.
The Company had been a good customer of the bank, which had received
about $10,000 in interest. The security offered for their line of
credit was unquestioned.

Yet the new directors had scarcely settled into place for the
approaching busy season before, without warning, the bank notified them
that they wished to close out the account.

When men set themselves up in business they expect to have to compete
for their share of trade. The farmers did not expect to find their
path lined with other grain dealers cheering them forward and waving
their hats. They expected competition of the keenest. What they could
not anticipate, however, was the lengths to which the fight might go or
the methods that might be adopted to put their Agency out of business
altogether.

Hitherto the grain grower had been in the background when it came to
marketing and handling grain. He was away out in the country
somewhere--busy plowing, busy seeding, busy harvesting, busy
something-or-other. He was a Farm Hand who so "tuckered himself out"
during daylight that he was glad to pry off his wrinkled boots and lie
down when it got dark in order to yank them on again, when the rooster
crowed at dawn, for the purpose of "tuckering himself out" all over
again. It was true that without him there would have been no grain to
handle; equally true that without the grain dealers the farmer would
have been in difficulty if he tried to hunt up individual consumers to
buy his wheat. The farmer interfering in the established grain trade
was something new and it was not to be supposed that when the surprise
of it wore off things were not liable to happen.

The farmer was quick to infer that the action of the bank in cutting
off the trading company's credit without apparent cause was another
move of the opposing forces. It was so palpably a vital spot at which
to strike.

This time, however, the threatening cloud evaporated almost as soon as
it appeared. The manager, W. H. Machaffie, resigned and assumed the
management of another bank. He was a far-sighted financier, Mr.
Machaffie, and almost the first account he sought for the Home Bank was
that of the Grain Growers' Grain Company. The Home Bank was ne