But when the second annual meeting of the Company was held they were able to show that the volume of farmers' grain handled was almost five million bushels, double that of the first year, while the net profits amounted to over thirty thousand dollars. The number of farmer shareholders had increased to nearly three thousand with applications on file for another twelve hundred and a steady awakening of interest among the farmers was to be noticed all over the West. All this in spite of the general shortage of money, a reduced total crop yield and the keenest competition from rival grain interests. It had been apparent to the directors that if the business grew as conditions seemed to warrant it doing, it would require to be highly organized. Bit by bit the service to the farmer was being widened. For instance, the nucleus of a Claims Department had been established during the year; for under the laws governing the Canadian railway companies the latter were required to deliver to terminal elevators the amount of grain a farmer loaded into a car and to leave the car in a suitable condition to receive grain. The official weights at the terminal were unquestioned and if a farmer could furnish reasonable evidence of the quantity of grain he had loaded, any leakage in transit would furnish a claim case against the railway. During six months the farmers' company had collected for its shippers nearly two thousand dollars in such claims, a beginning sufficient to illustrate that the Company was destined to serve the farmers in many practical ways if they would only stand behind it. IF the farmers would stand behind it! But would they? It was a question which was forever popping up to obscure the future. Many tongues were busy with inuendo to belittle what the farmers had accomplished already and to befog their efforts to advance still farther. At every shipping point in the West industrious little mallets were knocking away on the Xylophone of Doubt, all playing the same tune: "Just Kiss Yourself Good-Bye!" No farmers' business organization ever had been a success in the past and none ever could be. This new trading venture was going to go off with a loud bang one of these fine days and every farmer who had shipped grain to it would stand a first-class chance of losing it. You betcha! The Grain Growers' Associations mightn't be so bad; yes, they'd done some good. But this concern in the grain business--run by a few men, wasn't it? Well, say, does a cat go by a saucer of cream without taking a lick? "Farmers' company" they called it, eh? Go and tell it to your grandmother!