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Updated: September 12, 2025
"But so long as he can't get wheat," muttered Hornung at the end of his reflections, "he can't hurt me. And he can't get it. That I know." For Hornung controlled the situation. So far back as the February of that year an "unknown bull" had been making his presence felt on the floor of the Board of Trade.
When the other had taken himself off, Hornung sat for some moments gazing abstractedly toward his office windows, thinking over the whole matter. He had just agreed to release to Truslow, at the rate of one dollar and ten cents per bushel, one hundred thousand out of the two million and odd bushels of wheat that he, Hornung, controlled, or actually owned.
Hornung nodded; but the broker added: "Remember, I was against it from the very beginning. I know we've cleared up over a hundred thou'. I would have fifty times preferred to have lost twice that and smashed Truslow dead. Bet you what you like he makes us pay for it somehow." "Huh!" grunted his principal. "How about insurance, and warehouse charges, and carrying expenses on that lot?
Hornung saw his chance, seized it, and in a few months had turned the tables, had cornered the product, and virtually driven the bear clique out of the pit. On the same day that the delivery of the hundred thousand bushels was made to Truslow, Hornung met his broker at his lunch club. "Well," said the latter, "I see you let go that line of stuff to Truslow."
This was followed by the horrid sacking of the little town of Arenas, during which a Nassauer named Hornung, not only, like a second Scipio, generously released a beautiful girl who had fallen into his hands, but sword in hand defended her from his fellow-soldiers.
When Scott takes us into Luckie Mucklebackit’s cottage, or tells the story of “The Two Drovers;” when Wordsworth sings to us the reverie of “Poor Susan;” when Kingsley shows us Alton Locke gazing yearningly over the gate which leads from the highway into the first wood he ever saw; when Hornung paints a group of chimney-sweepers—more is done toward linking the higher classes with the lower, toward obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness, than by hundreds of sermons and philosophical dissertations.
By the middle of March the commercial reports of the daily press had begun to speak of "the powerful bull clique"; a few weeks later that legendary condition of affairs implied and epitomized in the magic words "Dollar Wheat" had been attained, and by the first of April, when the price had been boosted to one dollar and ten cents a bushel, Hornung had disclosed his hand, and in place of mere rumours, the definite and authoritative news that May wheat had been cornered in the Chicago pit went flashing around the world from Liverpool to Odessa and from Duluth to Buenos Ayres.
"Now, Mr. Gates, if you will sign for Mr. Truslow I guess that'll be all," remarked Hornung when he had finished reading. Hornung affixed his signature to the two documents and passed them over to Gates, who signed for his principal and client, Truslow or, as he had been called ever since he had gone into the fight against Hornung's corner the Great Bear.
True, Hornung would then be without his enemy's money, but Truslow would have been eliminated from the situation, and that so Hornung told himself was always a consummation most devoutly, strenuously and diligently to be striven for. Truslow once dead was dead, but the Bear was never more dangerous than when desperate.
But not ten minutes after the opening, Going was surprised out of all countenance to hear shouted from the other side of the pit these words: "Sell May at one-fifty." Going was for the moment touching elbows with Kimbark on one side and with Merriam on the other, all three belonging to the "Hornung crowd." Their answering challenge of "Sold" was as the voice of one man.
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