e pleasant by-ways; the menace of new
responsibilities to be faced and new difficulties to be overcome. Into
the space of Monday morning drain the dregs of last week's commitments
to gather into stagnant pools upon the desks and benches of toiling and
scheming humanity. It is the end of the holiday, the foot of the new
hill whose crest is Saturday night and whose most pleasant outlook is
the Sunday to come.

Men go to their work reluctant and resentful and reach out for the
support which the lunch-hour brings. One o'clock in London is about six
o'clock in Chicago. Therefore the significance of shoals of cablegrams
which lay on the desks of certain brokers was not wholly apparent until
late in the evening, and was not thoroughly understood until late on
Tuesday morning, when to other and greater shoals of cables came the
terse price-lists from the Board of Trade in Chicago, and on top of all
the wirelessed Press accounts for the sensational jump in wheat.

"Wheat soaring," said one headline. "Frantic scenes in the Pit," said
another. "Wheat reaches famine price," blared a third.

Beale passing through to Whitehall heard the shrill call of the newsboys
and caught the word "wheat." He snatched a paper from the hands of a boy
and read.

Every corn-market in the Northern Hemisphere was in a condition of
chaos. Prices were jumping to a figure beyond any which the most
stringent days of the war had produced.

He slipped into a telephone booth, gave a Treasury number and McNorton
answered.

"Have you seen the papers?" he asked.

"No, but I've heard. You mean about the wheat boom?"

"Yes--the game has started."

"Where are you--wait for me, I'll join you."

Three minutes later McNorton appeared from the Whitehall end of Scotland
Yard. Beale hailed a cab and they drove to the hotel together.

"Warrants have been issued for van Heerden and Milsom and the girl
Glaum," he said. "I expect we shall find the nest empty, but I have sent
men to all the railway stations--do you think we've moved too late?"

"Everything depends on the system that van Heerden has adopted," replied
Beale, "he is the sort of man who would keep everything in his own
hands. If he has done that, and we catch him, we may prevent a world
catastrophe."

At the hotel they found Kitson waiting in the vestibule.

"Well?" he asked, "I gather that you've lost van Heerden, but if the
newspapers mean anything, his hand is down on the table. Everybody is