“Lord, you go swearing and damning ’round here like a pirate sometimes, J. ,” Gretry went on. “I haven’t heard you cuss before in twenty years. Look out, now, that I don’t tell on you to your Sunday school superintendents.”

“I guess they’d cuss, too,” observed Jadwin, “if they were long forty million wheat, and had to know just where every hatful of it was every second of the time. It was all very well for us to whoop about swinging a corner that afternoon in your office. But the real thing⁠—well, you don’t have any trouble keeping awake. Do you suppose we can keep the fact of our corner dark much longer?”

“I fancy not,” answered the broker, putting on his hat and thrusting his papers into his breast pocket. “If we bust Crookes, it’ll come out⁠—and it won’t matter then. I think we’ve got all the shorts there are.”