110 DEEP FURROWS 



trying to do to us? Well, he was at the meeting and 

 came over to my room at the hotel afterward," remarked 

 Kennedy. " That's how interested he was. We had 

 quite a talk over the whole situation. Told me he had 

 an arrangement to buy grain for Graves & Reilly, 

 besides running the Farmers' Elevator at Russell, and 

 he offered to ship us all the grain that wasn't consigned 

 to his firm. We've got quite a few carloads from him 

 during the season." 



" If there were only a few more elevator operators 

 like him!" sighed Partridge. "When I was up there 

 last July, selling stock, only eight men turned out," he 

 recalled. " Crerar was one of them. I sold four shares. 

 Crerar bought one. Say, he'd be a good man to have 

 on the next directorate. How would it be if I wrote 

 him a letter about it?" 



But " Alex." Crerar laid that letter aside and 

 promptly forgot it ; he did not take it seriously enough 

 to answer it. If there was anything he could do to help 

 along a thing in which he believed as thoroughly as he 

 believed in the grain growers' movement and the 

 farmers' agency he was more than willing to do it ; but 

 executive offices, he felt, were for older and more 

 experienced men than he. 



As manager of an elevator in his home town, as buyer 

 for a grain firm and as a farmer himself he had had 

 opportunities for studying the situation from many 

 angles. From the first he had followed the organization 

 of the farmers with much interest and sympathy. He 

 could not forget his own early experiences in marketing 

 grain when the elevators offered him fifty -nine cents per 

 bushel, nineteen cents under the price at the terminal 

 at the time. The freight rate on his No. 1 Northern 

 wheat he knew to be only nine cents per bushel and 



