Jadwin had been drawn into the troubled waters of the Pit, and was by now “blooded to the game.”  It was in April that he decided that better times and higher prices were coming for wheat, and announced his intentions to Sam Gretry, his broker.

“Sam,” he said, “the time is come for a great big chance.  We’ve been hammering wheat down and down and down till we’ve got it below the cost of production, and now she won’t go any further with all the hammering in the world.  The other fellows, the rest of the bear crowd, don’t seem to see it; but I see it.  Before fall we’re going to have higher prices.  Wheat is going up, and when it does I mean to be right there.  I’m going to buy.  I’m going to buy September wheat, and I’m going to buy it to-morrow—­500,000 bushels of it; and if the market goes as I think it will later on, I’m going to buy more.  I’m going to boost this market right through till the last bell rings, and from now on Curtis Jadwin spells b-u-double l—­bull.”

“They’ll slaughter you,” said Gretry; “slaughter you in cold blood.  You’re just one man against a gang—­a gang of cut-throats.  Those bears have got millions and millions back of them.  ‘J,’ you are either Napoleonic, or—­or a colossal idiot!”

All through the three years that had passed Jadwin had grown continually richer.  His real estate appreciated in value; rents went up.  Every time he speculated in wheat it was upon a larger scale, and every time he won.  Hitherto he had been a bear; now, after the talk with Gretry, he had secretly “turned bull” with the suddenness of a strategist.

A marvellous golden luck followed Jadwin all that summer.  The crops were poor, the yield moderate.

Jadwin sold out in September, having made a fortune, and then, in a single vast clutch, bought 3,000,000 bushels of the December option.

Never before had he ventured so deeply into the Pit.

One morning in November, at breakfast, Laura said to her husband, “Curtis, dear, when is it all going to end—­your speculating?  You never used to be this way.  It seems as though, nowadays, I never had you to myself.  Even when you are not going over papers and reports, or talking by the hour to Mr. Gretry in the library, your mind seems to be away from me.  I—­I am lonesome, dearest, sometimes.  And, Curtis, what is the use?  We’re so rich now we can’t spend our money.”

“Oh, it’s not the money!” he answered.  “It’s the fun of the thing—­the excitement.”

That very week Jadwin made 500,000 dollars.

“I don’t own a grain of wheat now,” he assured his wife.  “I’ve got to be out of it.”

But try as he would, the echoes of the rumbling of the Pit reached Jadwin at every hour of the day and night.  He stayed at home over Christmas.  Inactive, he sat there idle, while the clamour of the Pit swelled daily louder, and the price of wheat went up.

Jadwin chafed and fretted at his inaction and his impatience harried him like a gadfly.  Would no one step into the place of high command.