primary receipts, and noted down the amount of wheat on passage, the
exports and the imports.

And all these sounds, the chatter of the telegraph, the intoning of the
messenger boys, the shouts and cries of clerks and traders, the shuffle
and trampling of hundreds of feet, the whirring of telephone signals
rose into the troubled air, and mingled overhead to form a vast note,
prolonged, sustained, that reverberated from vault to vault of the airy
roof, and issued from every doorway, every opened window in one long
roll of uninterrupted thunder. In the Wheat Pit the bids, no longer
obedient of restraint, began one by one to burst out, like the first
isolated shots of a skirmish line. Grossmann had flung out an arm
crying:

"'Sell twenty-five May at ninety-five and an eighth," while Kelly and
Semple had almost simultaneously shouted, "'Give seven-eighths for May!"

The official reporter had been leaning far over to catch the first
quotations, one eye upon the clock at the end of the room. The hour and
minute hands were at right angles.

Then suddenly, cutting squarely athwart the vague crescendo of the
floor came the single incisive stroke of a great gong. Instantly a
tumult was unchained. Arms were flung upward in strenuous gestures, and
from above the crowding heads in the Wheat Pit a multitude of hands,
eager, the fingers extended, leaped into the air. All articulate
expression was lost in the single explosion of sound as the traders
surged downwards to the centre of the Pit, grabbing each other,
struggling towards each other, tramping, stamping, charging through
with might and main. Promptly the hand on the great dial above the
clock stirred and trembled, and as though driven by the tempest breath
of the Pit moved upward through the degrees of its circle. It paused,
wavered, stopped at length, and on the instant the hundreds of
telegraph keys scattered throughout the building began clicking off the
news to the whole country, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from
Mackinac to Mexico, that the Chicago market had made a slight advance
and that May wheat, which had closed the day before at ninety-three and
three-eighths, had opened that morning at ninety-four and a half.

But the advance brought out no profit-taking sales. The redoubtable
Leaycraft and the Porteous trio, Fairchild, Paterson, and Goodlock,
shook their heads when the Pit offered ninety-four for parts of their
holdings. The price held firm. Goodlock