Bannon or Peterson or Max could get at them and drive them out. Young
men with snap-shot cameras way-laid Bannon on his way to luncheon, and
published, with his picture, elaborate stories of his skill in averting
a strike--stories that were not at all true.

Far out in Minnesota and Montana and South Dakota farmers were driving
their wheat-laden wagons to the hundreds of local receiving houses that
dotted the railroad lines. Box cars were waiting for the red grain, to
roll it away to Minneapolis and Duluth--day and night the long trains
were puffing eastward. Everywhere the order was, "Rush!" Railroad
presidents and managers knew that Page was in a hurry, and they knew
what Page's hurries meant, not only to the thousands of men who depended
on him for their daily bread, but to the many great industries of the
Northwest, whose credit and integrity were inextricably interwoven with
his. Division superintendents knew that Page was in a hurry, and they
snapped out orders and discharged half-competent men and sent quick
words along the hot wires that were translated by despatchers and
operators and yard masters into profane, driving commands. Conductors
knew it, brakemen and switchmen knew it; they made flying switches in
defiance of companies' orders, they ran where they used to walk, they
slung their lunch pails on their arms and ate when and where they could,
gazing over their cold tea at some portrait of Page, or of a member of
the Clique, or of Bannon, in the morning's paper.

Elevator men at Minneapolis knew that Page was in a hurry, and they
worked day and night at shovel and scale. Steamboat masters up at Duluth
knew it, and mates and deck hands and stevedores and dockwallopers--more
than one steamer scraped her paint in the haste to get under the long
spouts that waited to pour out grain by the hundred thousand bushels.
Trains came down from Minneapolis, boats came down from Duluth,
warehouse after warehouse at Chicago was filled; and over-strained
nerves neared the breaking point as the short December days flew by.
Some said the Clique would win, some said Page would win; in the wheat
pit men were fighting like tigers; every one who knew the facts was
watching Charlie Bannon.

The storm came on the eighteenth of the month. It was predicted two days
ahead, and ship masters were warned at all the lake ports. It was a
Northwest blizzard, driven down from the Canadian Rockies at sixty miles
an hour, leaving two fee