A Deal in Wheat and Other Stories of the New and Old West is a collection of short stories written by the American author Frank Norris. It was published posthumously in 1903 by Doubleday, Page & Company and composed primarily of recently published works.
The stories "A Deal in Wheat" "The Wife of Chino" "A Bargain with Peg-Leg" "The Passing of Cock-Eye Blacklock" "A Memorandum of Sudden Death" "Two Hearts that Beat as One" "The Dual Personality of Sick Dick Nickerson" "The Ship That Saw a Ghost" "The Ghost in the Crosstrees" "The Riding of Felipe"
Plot summary and character list "A Deal in Wheat" The story A Deal in Wheat was first published as a serial in 1902 before being published posthumously as part of this collection the following year. It is a five part story about wheat speculation at the Chicago Board of Trade. As wheat prices fall in the midst of an economic feud between two influential speculators, the story's protagonist, a wheat farmer from Kansas, loses his farm. The book ends with the farmer relocating to Chicago, where he is denied free bread due to rising wheat prices. Influenced by naturalism, which the author contrasted with the realism. The latter he found to be too superficial, honing in on the "accuracy" of surface details, while naturalism he understood to dramatize the "truth" to expose the relations between people from different segments and classes underlying the everyday experiences of life.
Plot I. The first of the five sections of the story, entitled "The Bear- Wheat at Sixty-Two", takes place in rural Kansas. Sam Lewiston leaves his wife, Emma, home on the ranch while he goes into town one last time to try to sell his wheat to Bridges & Co., Grain Dealers before being forced out of the market. At sixty-two cents a bushel, Lewiston can no longer afford to raise wheat and must take a job with his wife’s brother in Chicago.
II. The next section, "The Bull- Wheat at a Dollar-Ten", introduces the two main players of the Chicago-run wheat business, the bear and the bull: Treslow and Hornung. When Treslow had let the price fall to sixty-two cents, Hornung had almost run him out of business. Instead, Mr. Gates makes a deal with Treslow, on behalf of Hornung, to sell him one hundred thousand bushels for export at $1.10 each.
III. Hornung has grown to dominate wheat sales at $1.50 a bushel. One day in "The Pit", a mysterious man named Kennedy sells one thousand bushels to three of Hornung’s men: Going, Kimbark, and Merriam. They get word that a total of twenty-five thousand bushels are being sold in Chicago by someone other than Hornung. Hornung instructs them to continue buying but, with The Bear supposedly out of the market, they do not know who they are buying from.
IV. The fourth section, "The Belt Line", takes place in Hornung’s home. His broker, Billy, and a detective named Cyrus Ryder are there to discuss the now eighty thousand bushels he has purchased. Ryder reveals that the bushels are the same ones that Treslow had purchased to export. He had been shuttling them around the city on trains, making it appear as if they had just arrived. Hornung laughs upon finding out he has been cheated, and decides to further raise the price.
V. The final section of the story, "The Bread Line", describes Sam Lewiston’s life in Chicago. He stands in the bread line with many other poor, hungry workers who rely on the bakery’s nightly giveaways, but the price of wheat has put too much of a strain on the bakery. Lewiston manages to find work as a street cleaner and climb the rankings to success but, because of his experiences as a farmer and a worker, his resentment towards the operators of the wheat business will not die.
Character list Sam Lewiston Emma Lewiston Truslow Mr. Gates Hornung Going Kimbark Merriam Kennedy Billy Cyrus Ryder
"The Wife of Chino" Plot I. The story starts off with "Chino’s Wife", in which Lockwood, the superintendent of the Hand-over-fist Gravel Mine in Placer County, California, sits in solitude on his porch smoking tobacco after dinner. He graduated from the Columbia School of Mines and has since spent his life in isolated Western mining communities. He enjoys isolation, and spends every evening admiring the scenery and fantasizing about Felice Zavalla, a beautiful Mexican woman married to one of his employees.
II. "Madness", documents Lockwood’s strong desire to be married to Felice despite his inability to understand her. He has never seen the world or socialized much, having studied for the first part of his life and worked for the latter. His isolation causes him to get carried away with emotions, and he is convinced he should have Felice.
III. In "Chino Goes to Town", Lockwood begins finding excused to interact with Felice, such as to give her mail, until he at once realizes that he has crossed the line and begins to avoid her entirely. He, instead, buries himself in his work until an accident in the mine breaks his foot. He usually goes to the Iowa Hill Post Office every couple of weeks with Chino to deliver the brick of gold collected from the mine, but his injury prevents him from going. He is left with nothing but thoughts of Felice to ease the pain.
IV. In the section, "A Dispatch from the Express Messenger", Felice confronts Lockwood and asks why he has been avoiding her. She gave him a look that told him she had made a mistake with Chino. Just when Lockwood realizes that he will not keep himself from having an affair with Felice he gets a message from Iowa Hill informing him of a criminal named Reno Kid on the trail. The messenger advises him not to leave, but Chino was already on his way. Lockwood realizes he has no other options, and struggles his way onto a horse and takes off.
V. "The Trail" documents Lockwood’s pursuit of Chino. He almost reaches Iowa Hill with no sign of him or Reno Kid, so he turns around to search harder. He eventually hears a horse galloping in the darkness and assumes it to be Reno Kid and shoots, but it is Chino.
VI. "The Discovery of Felice" begins when Lockwood arrives back at the Zavalla’s house and confesses his actions to Felice. Felice fetches the doctor and, as he examines Chino’s wound, she tells Lockwood that now they can be together. Lockwood, however, suddenly sees Felice in a different light. She appears savage and unfaithful.
Character list Lockwood Felice Zavalla Chino Zavalla Reno Kid
"A Bargain with Peg-Leg" Plot This story describes Bunt McBride’s account of Peg-Leg Smith, an infamous one-legged criminal. Bunt retells the story on his break from the night shift at the mine.
Peg-Leg amputated his own leg and fashioned himself one from a tree stump after he was shot. He was known for his nastiness and spent his life trying to get people to stop using cuss words. Bunt encountered him at a bar in Yuma when Bunt was just a teenager. He was there watching his friend, Clarense, play a gambling game with some men that involved taking their temperatures. Clarence won, and the guys start accusing him of cheating. Peg-Leg had been sleeping in the back room, but he appeared and tackled Clarence from across the room. Bunt jumped to Clarence’s defense and pulled off Peg-Leg’s leg. Knowing he was in trouble, he chucked the wood out the window, grabbed Peg-Leg’s gun from the back room, and took off across the street. Outside, a kid had gone to retrieve the leg and went to hand it to Peg-Leg, but Bunt grabbed it. Peg-Leg assured Bunt that he would come after him someday. Bunt knew what Peg-Leg is capable of and did not want to live in fear, but he also knew his weakness, so he made a deal with Peg-leg to never swear again in exchange for his safety. Peg-Leg was desperate to have at least one convert, so he gave in.
Three years later, Bunt says, he came across Peg-Leg again in Sonora, Arizona. The town was full of men seeking gold. He got word that a hotel was on fire and rushed over to see Peg-Leg at the window of the flaming building. People below were yelling for him to jump, promising to catch him on a blanket. Bunt starts chucking before he can finish the story. There hadn’t been a blanket there.
Character list Bunt McBride Peg-Leg Smith Clarence
"The Passing of Cock-Eye Blacklock" Plot This story, like the last, describes Bunt McBride’s account of the life of a Western criminal, Cock-Eye Blacklock. Bunt and the narrator finish dinner by the campfire and ride out into the Idaho desert because it is Bunt’s night to ride the herd. Bunt has lived in the West for a long time and is wise when it comes to herding.
Bunt begins his story by recounting a herding experience in a Nevada blizzard. He and Cock-Eye Blacklock rubbed tobacco juice in their eyes to stay awake. Blacklock was a bad man and had killed a lot of people. Bunt says that he went bad about two years after that, though, He traveled around gambling, taking all the money from a community before moving on. He got through New Mexico and Arizona and was making his way through Nevada when he shot a kid in Reno and headed up to a mining camp in Placer County, California. He immediately got into trouble there, too, and before long was driven out of camp.
Bunt lived nearby in Iowa Hill at the time, and he used to take weekly fishing trips to the American River with his boss. On one trip they noticed that all the fish had been shot out of the river. The Fish Commissioners of the State assigned a guard to the area, but the fish kept dying. Blacklock was an obvious suspect, so Bunt, the Boss, and a marshal set up shooting boxes in trees to stand watch and try to catch him in the act. Unsuccessful for weeks, they caught a break one day with the help from a local dog named Sloppy Weather. Blacklock threw dynamite into the water to kill the fish, but Sloppy Weather jumped in to fetch the dynamite and bring it back. Blacklock ran, but the dog chased him until the dynamite went off and they both got caught in the explosion. On his grave they wrote, "Moral: A hook and line is good enough fish-tackle for any honest man".
The sun rises over the desert just as Bunt finishes the story. He and the narrator ride back into camp.
Character list Bunt McBride Cock-Eye Blacklock Narrator The boss The marshal Sloppy Weather
"A Memorandum of Sudden Death" Plot In this story the narrator reads a manuscript written by Arthur Staples Karslake just before he died while serving in the United States Cavalry. The narrator has no personal connection to the author but has received permission from Patterson Karslake, the author’s brother, to publish the manuscript. He gets it form Juan Tejada, a harness-maker in Albuquerque, who has been keeping it for a bone collector by the name of Bass while he is on a trip in the Klondike. Parts of the manuscript are in pen and parts are in pencil. The narrator interjects periodically while reading the manuscript to explain that the pieces are in fragments.
The manuscript begins with Bunt, Idaho, Estorijo, and Karslake spotting 8 Native Americans following them while they are jogging. They stop to get water, and Karslake writes the first account while they are stopped. In it he refers to them as "bucks". They continue on, and the next day it appears as if there are 9. The "bucks" charge towards them, but veer off at the last minute, then circle around and continue following them. They constantly move in and out of shooting range, but Idaho manages to kill one of them. Shots are fired periodically, but each day the four men continue on and each night they set up camp. On the fifth and final day of the account Bunt, Idaho, Estorijo, and all of their horses have died. Karsdale describes a feeling of revelation he experiences as he weakens and death grows closer. He explains that, as death is upon him, he begins to understand the secret of life. He identifies himself and the other men he was with, and he leaves his unfinished work to his brother, Patterson Karslake.