And before the door of the room was closed, Jadwin was back at the table again. Once more, painfully, toilfully, he went over his plans, retesting, altering, recombining, his hands full of lists, of despatches, and of endless columns of memoranda. Occasionally he murmured fragments of sentences to himself. “H’m⁠ ⁠… I must look out for that.⁠ ⁠… They can’t touch us there.⁠ ⁠… The annex of that Nickel Plate elevator will hold⁠—let’s see⁠ ⁠… half a million.⁠ ⁠… If I buy the grain within five days after arrival I’ve got to pay storage, which is, let’s see⁠—three-quarters of a cent times eighty thousand.⁠ ⁠…”

An hour passed. At length Jadwin pushed back from the table, drank a glass of ice water, and rose, stretching.

“Lord, I must get some sleep,” he muttered.

He threw off his clothes and went to bed, but even as he composed himself to sleep, the noises of the street in the awakening city invaded the room through the chink of the window he had left open. The noises were vague. They blended easily into a far-off murmur; they came nearer; they developed into a cadence: