iver, the Clique would be winners; but if it should have been
delivered, to the last bushel, the corner would be broken, and the
Clique would drop from sight as so many reckless men had dropped before.
The readers of every great newspaper in the country were watching Page &
Company. The general opinion was that they could not do it, that such an
enormous quantity of grain could not be delivered and registered in
time, even if it were to be had.

But the public overlooked, indeed it had no means of knowing, one
important fact. The members of the Clique were new men in the public
eye. They represented apparently unlimited capital, but they were young,
eager, overstrung; flushed with the prospect of success, they were
talking for publication. They believed they knew of every bushel in the
country that was to be had, and they allowed themselves to say that they
had already bought more than this. If this were true, Page was beaten.
But it was not true. The young men of the Clique had forgotten that Page
had trained agents in every part of the world; that he had alliances
with great railroad and steamer lines, that he had a weather bureau and
a system of crop reports that outdid those of the United States
Government, that he could command more money than two such Cliques, and,
most important of all, that he did _not_ talk for publication. The young
speculators were matching their wits against a great machine. Page had
the wheat, he was making the effort of his career to deliver it, and he
had no idea of losing.

Already millions of bushels had been rushed into Chicago. It was here
that the fight took on its spectacular features, for the grain must be
weighed and inspected before it could be accepted by the Board of Trade,
and this could be done only in "regular" warehouses. The struggle had
been to get control of these warehouses. It was here that the Clique had
done their shrewdest work, and they had supposed that Page was finally
outwitted, until they discovered that he had coolly set about building a
million-bushel annex to his new house, Calumet K. And so it was that the
newspapers learned that on the chance of completing Calumet K before the
thirty-first of December hung the whole question of winning and losing;
that if Bannon should fail, Page would be short two million bushels. And
then came reporters and newspaper illustrators, who hung about the
office and badgered Hilda, or perched on timber piles and sketched until