owners of ordinary warehouses
who found their buildings useless, once the overtopping elevator went
up alongside--from small buyers who found themselves being driven out
of the market with the flat warehouses. But these voices were drowned
in the swish of grain in the chutes and the staccato of the elevator
engines--lost in the larger exigencies of the wheat. The railway
company held to their promises and the tall grain boxes reared their
castor tops against the sky in increasing clusters.

To operate a standard elevator at a country point with profit it was
considered necessary in the early days to fill it three times in a
season unless the owner proposed to deal in grain himself and make a
buyer's profit in addition to handling grain for others. The cost of
building and operating the class of elevator demanded by the railway
company was partly responsible for this. Before long the number of
elevators in Manitoba and the North-West Territories increased till it
was impossible for all of them to obtain the three fillings per season
even had their owners been inclined to perform merely a handling
service.

But those who had taken up the railway's offer with such avidity and
had invested large sums of shareholders' capital in building the
elevator accommodation were mostly shrewd grain dealers whose primary
object was to buy and sell. These interested corporations were not
constructing elevators in order to admire their silhouettes against the
beautiful prairie sunsets! In every corner of the earth the Dollar
Almighty, or its equivalent, was being stalked by all sorts and
conditions of men, some of whom chased it noisily and openly while
others hunted with their boots in one hand. Properly enough, the grain
men were out for all that their investment could earn and for all the
wheat which they could buy at one price and sell at another. That was
their business, just as it was the business of the railway company to
transport the grain at a freight rate which would net a profit, just as
it was the farmer's business--

But to the farmer it seemed that he had no business! He merely grew
the grain. Apparently a farmer was a pair of pants, a shirt and a
slouch hat that sat on a wagon-load of wheat, drove it up the incline
into the elevator and rattled away again for another load! To farm was
an occupation easily parsed--subjunctive mood, past tense, passive
voice! The farmer was third person, singular! He came an