“Take care, old fellow,” responded Brent anxiously. “You are working far harder over this business than I am, and Heaven knows it’s never out of my mind many minutes at a time. We can’t either of us afford to break down. Just take the thing philosophically--which means, you know, look at it with the eyes of a fatalist. We can do just so much and no more, and we are doing it. I’m not going to let my hindsight abuse my foresight any longer. I shall sleep better to-night than I have slept for six months, and you can do the same if you will remember that my abominable troubles are beyond your reach until ten o’clock to-morrow. Sit down a minute longer while I tell you a little story,” and Brent, with many quaint touches of dry humor, of which he had a rich fund rarely drawn upon, told of his first meeting with his ragged London _protégé_. Wharton enjoyed the little incident hugely, and the genuine ring of college days in his laugh was a better assurance than drugs could give that his rest would not after all be sleepless. They were critical days which followed. The country passed through a crisis more perilous than the keenest observers could understand or fathom. The course of events was a complete enigma. The unexpected happened continually. Where danger seemed greatest it disappeared. Where it had been unsuspected, it broke out even in violence and bloodshed. Where bread had been most scarce, it became mysteriously plentiful. Where hunger had been clemming in silence, it suddenly gave voice, and honest hands defied the law that they might feed empty bellies. And the world of trade seemed turned over to laws of paradox. The distrust of gold, of money, was growing rapidly stronger, yet there sprang up a vigorous demand for it. The banks wanted it, and began putting up their rates. It was no longer a drug in the market. The effect upon perverse human nature was what it always had been. As long as it had been plentiful nobody cared for it; when it began to grow scarce everybody clamored for it. Within ten days the visible supply of money in New York shrank more than one hundred millions. There was a sudden halt in the mad speculation in wheat. The newspapers discovered that bread by the loaf in New York and Chicago could be bought cheaper than wheat by the bushel or flour by the barrel. The revelation was received first with incredulity and then with dismay by the holders of grain. Under this influence and that of tightening money, the more timid of the speculators began to sell out. That was enough. The market trembled, tottered, and then the crash came. The wheat pit in Chicago was the scene of the greatest tragedy in trade of all its long history of great catastrophes. Black ruin stalked into the wild arena and laid low great and small alike.