he has the
education--used to be a school-teacher, I believe."

"Remember when I went up to Russell, during their Fair in October, to
tell them what the Exchange was trying to do to us? Well, he was at
the meeting and came over to my room at the hotel afterward," remarked
Kennedy. "That's how interested he was. We had quite a talk over the
whole situation. Told me he had an arrangement to buy grain for Graves
& Reilly, besides running the Farmers' Elevator at Russell, and he
offered to ship us all the grain that wasn't consigned to his firm.
We've got quite a few carloads from him during the season."

"If there were only a few more elevator operators like him!" sighed
Partridge. "When I was up there last July, selling stock, only eight
men turned out," he recalled. "Crerar was one of them. I sold four
shares. Crerar bought one. Say, he'd be a good man to have on the
next directorate. How would it be if I wrote him a letter about it?"

But "Alex." Crerar laid that letter aside and promptly forgot it; he
did not take it seriously enough to answer it. If there was anything
he could do to help along a thing in which he believed as thoroughly as
he believed in the grain growers' movement and the farmers' agency he
was more than willing to do it; but executive offices, he felt, were
for older and more experienced men than he.

As manager of an elevator in his home town, as buyer for a grain firm
and as a farmer himself he had had opportunities for studying the
situation from many angles. From the first he had followed the
organization of the farmers with much interest and sympathy. He could
not forget his own early experiences in marketing grain when the
elevators offered him fifty-nine cents per bushel, nineteen cents under
the price at the terminal at the time. The freight rate on his No. 1
Northern wheat he knew to be only nine cents per bushel and when he was
docked a bushel and a half to a load of fifty bushels on top of it all
he had been aroused to protest.

A protest from young Crerar was no mild and bashful affair, either. It
was big-fisted with vigor. But when, with characteristic spirit, he
had pointed out the injustice of the price offered and the dockage
taken--the elevator man, quite calmly, had told him to go to the devil!

"There's no use going to the other elevators, for you're all alike,"
said young Crerar hotly.

"Then take your damned grain home again!" grinned the elevator operator