“The after-consequences of this little melodrama,” Phipps interposed, with grim fury, “certainly present something of a problem, I have wondered, during the last hour or so, whether you can be perfectly sane, Wingate.  What good can you expect to do by this brigandage?”

“The very word ’brigandage’,” Wingate observed, with a smile, “suggests my answer—­ransom.”

“But you can’t want money?” Phipps protested.

“You know what I want,” was the stern rejoinder.  “You and I have already discussed it when you came to see me about that young man.”

Phipps laughed uneasily.

“I remember some preposterous suggestion about selling wheat,” he admitted.  “If you think, however, that you can alter our entire business principles by a piece of foolery like this, you are making the mistake of your life.”

“We are wasting time,” Wingate declared a little shortly.  “It is better that we have a complete understanding.  Get this into your head,” he went on, drawing a long, ugly-looking pistol from his trousers pocket, and displaying it.  “This is the finest automatic pistol in the world, and I am one of the best marksmen in the American Army.  I shall leave you, for the present, ungagged, but if rescue comes to you by any efforts of your own, I give you my word of honour as an American gentleman that I shall shoot the three of you and be proud of my night’s work.”

“And swing for it afterwards,” Dredlinton threatened.  “The man’s mad!”

“The man is in earnest,” Phipps growled.  “That much, at least, I think we can grant him.  What is the meaning of that piece of mummery, Wingate?” he added, pointing to the loaf of bread.  “What are your terms?  You must state them, sooner or later.  Let us have them now.”

“Agreed,” Wingate replied.  “The costs of that loaf is, I believe, to be exact, one and tenpence ha’penny—­one and tenpence ha’penny to poor people whose staple food it is.  When you sign an authority to sell wheat in sufficient bulk to bring the cost down to sixpence, you can have the loaf and go as soon as the sale is finished.  You will find here,” he went on, laying a document upon the table, “a calculation which may help you.  Your approximate holdings of wheat may be exaggerated a trifle, although these lists came from some one in your own office, but I think you will find that the figures there will be of assistance to you when you decide to give the word.”

“Let me get this clearly into my head,” Phipps begged, after a moment’s amazed silence, “without the possibility of any mistake.  You mean that we are to sell wheat at about sixty per cent, less than the present market value—­in many cases sixty per cent. less than we gave for it?”

“That, I imagine, will be about the position,” Wingate admitted.

“The man is a fool!” Rees snarled.  “It would mean ruin.”

Wingate remained impassive.

“The British and Imperial Granaries, Limited,” he said, “has been responsible for the ruin of a good many people.  It is time now that the pendulum swung the other way.—­Come, make up your minds.”