And Chicago has forgotten the lesson of the corn. All men have forgotten. It has never been told to the young men who come out of the corn fields to live in the city.

Once and once only in modern times the soul of America was stirred. The Civil War swept like a purifying fire through the land. Men marched together and knew the feel of shoulder to shoulder action. Brown stout bearded figures returned after the war to the villages. The beginning of a literature of strength and virility arose.

And then the time of sorrow and of stirring effort passed and prosperity returned. Only the aged are now cemented together by the sorrow of that time and there has been no new national sorrow.

It is a summer evening in America and the citizens sit in their houses after the effort of the day. They talk of the children in school or of the new difficulty of meeting the high prices of food stuff. In cities the bands play in the parks. In villages the lights go out and one hears the sound of hurrying horses on distant roads.

A thoughtful man walking in the streets of Chicago on such an evening sees women in white shirt waists and men with cigars in their mouths who sit on the porches of the houses. The man is from Ohio. He owns a factory in one of the large industrial towns there and has come to the city to sell his product. He is a man of the better sort, quiet, efficient, kindly. In his own community every one respects him and he respects himself. Now he walks and gives himself over to thoughts. He passes a house set among trees where a man cuts grass by the streaming light from a window. The song of the lawn mower stirs the walker. He idles along the street and looks in through the windows at Prints upon the walls. A white—clad woman sits playing on a piano. "Life is good," he says, lighting a cigar; "it climbs on and up toward a kind of universal fairness."

And then in the light from a street lamp the walker sees a man staggering along the sidewalk, muttering and helping himself with his hands upon a wall. The sight does not greatly disturb the pleasant satisfying thoughts that stir in his mind. He has eaten a good dinner at the hotel, he knows that drunken men are often but gay money- spending dogs who to-morrow morning will settle down to their work feeling secretly better for the night of wine and song.

My thoughtful man is an American with the disease of comfort and prosperity in his blood. He strolls along and turns a corner. He is satisfied with the cigar he smokes and, he decides, satisfied with the age in which he lives. "Agitators may howl," he says, "but on the whole life is good, and as for me I am going to spend my life attending to the business in hand."

The walker has turned a corner into a side street. Two men emerge from the door of a saloon and stand upon the sidewalk under a light. They wave their arms up and down. Suddenly one of them springs forward and with a quick forward thrust of his body and the flash of a clenched fist in the lamp light knocks his companion into the gutter. Down the street he sees rows of tall smoke-begrimed brick buildings hanging black and ominous against the sky. At the end of a street a huge mechanical apparatus lifts cars of coal and dumps them roaring and rattling into the bowels of a ship that lies tied in the river.

The walker throws his cigar away and looks about. A man walks before him in the silent street. He sees the man raise his fist to the sky and notes with a shock the movement of the lips and the hugeness and ugliness of the face in the lamplight.

Again he goes on, hurrying now, around another corner into a street filled with pawn shops, clothing stores and the clamour of voices. In his mind floats a picture. He sees two boys, clad in white rompers, feeding clover to a tame rabbit in a suburban back lawn and wishes he were at home in his own place. In his fancy the two sons are walking under apple trees and laughing and tusseling for a great bundle of newly pulled sweet smelling clover. The strange looking red man with the huge face he has seen in the street is looking at the two children over a garden wall. There is a threat in the look and the threat alarms him. Into his mind comes the notion that the man who looks over the wall wants to destroy the future of his children.

The night advances. Down a stairway beside a clothing store comes a woman with gleaming white teeth who is clad in a black dress. She makes a Peculiar little jerking movement with her head to the walker. A patrol wagon with clanging bells rushes through the street, two blue clad policemen sitting stiffly in the seat. A boy—he can't be above six—runs along the street pushing soiled newspapers under the noses of idlers on the corners, his shrill childish voice rises above the din of the trolley cars and the clanging notes of the patrol wagon.

The walker throws his cigar into the gutter and climbing the steps of a street car goes back to his hotel. His fine reflective mood is gone. He half wishes that something lovely might come into American life but the wish does not persist. He is only irritated and feels that a pleasant evening has been in some way spoiled. He is wondering if he will be successful in the business that brought him to the city. As he turns out the light in his room and putting his head upon the pillow listens to the noises of the city merged now into a quiet droning roar he thinks of the brick factory on the banks of the river in Ohio and as he falls into sleep the face of the red-haired man lowers at him from the factory door.

* * * * *

When McGregor returned to the city after the burial of his mother he began at once to try to put his idea of the marching men into form. For a long time he did not know how to begin. The idea was vague and shadowy. It belonged to the nights in the hills of his own country and seemed a little absurd when he tried to think of it in the daylight of North State Street in Chicago.

McGregor felt that he had to prepare himself. He believed that he could study books and learn much from men's ideas expressed in books without being overwhelmed by their thoughts. He became a student and quit the place in the apple-warehouse to the secret relief of the little bright-eyed superintendent who had never been able to get himself up to the point of raging at this big red fellow as he had raged at the German before McGregor's time. The warehouse man felt that during the meeting on the corner before the saloon on the day McGregor began to work for him something had happened. The miner's son had unmanned him. "A man ought to be boss in his own place," he sometimes muttered to himself, as he walked in the passageways among rows of piled apple barrels in the upper part of the warehouse wondering why the presence of McGregor irritated him.

From six o'clock in the evening until two in the morning McGregor now worked as night-cashier in a restaurant on South State Street below Van Buren and from two until seven in the morning he slept in a room whose windows looked down into Michigan Boulevard. On Thursday he was free, his place being taken for the evening by the man who owned the restaurant, a small excitable Irishman by the name of Tom O'Toole.

McGregor got his chance to become a student through the bank account belonging to Edith Carson. The opportunity arose in this way. On a summer evening after his return from Pennsylvania he sat with her in the darkened store back of the closed screen door. McGregor was morose and silent. On the evening before he had tried to talk to several men at the warehouse about the Marching Men and they had not understood. He blamed his inability with words and sat in the half darkness with his face in his hands and looked up the street saying nothing and thinking bitter thoughts.

The idea that had come to him made him half drunk with its possibilities and he knew that he must not let it make him drunk. He wanted to begin forcing men to do the simple thing full of meaning rather than the disorganised ineffective things and he had an ever- present inclination to arise, to stretch himself, to run into the streets and with his great arms see if he could not sweep the people before him, starting them on the long purposeful march that was to be the beginning of the rebirth of the world and that was to fill with meaning the lives of men. Then when he had walked the fever out of his blood and had frightened the people in the streets by the grim look in his face he tried to school himself to sit quietly waiting.

The woman sitting beside him in a low rocking chair began trying to tell him of something that had been in her mind. Her heart jumped and she talked slowly, pausing between sentences to conceal the trembling of her voice. "Would it help you in what you want to do if you could quit at the warehouse and spend your days in study?" she asked.

McGregor looked at her and nodded his head absent-mindedly. He thought of the nights in his room when the hard heavy work of the day in the warehouse seemed to have benumbed his brain.

"Besides the business here I have seventeen hundred dollars in the savings bank," said Edith, turning aside to conceal the eager hopeful look in her eyes. "I want to invest it. I do not want it lying there doing nothing. I want you to take it and make a lawyer of yourself."

Edith sat rigid in her chair waiting for his answer. She felt that she had put him to a test. In her mind was a new hope. "If he takes it he will not be walking out at the door some night and never coming back."

McGregor tried to think. He had not tried to explain to her his new notion of life and did not know how to begin.

"After all why not stick to my plan and be a lawyer?" he asked himself. "That might open the door. I'll do that," he said aloud to the woman. "Both you and mother have talked of it so I'll give it a trial. Yes, I'll take the money."

Again he looked at her as she sat before him flushed and eager and was touched by her devotion as he had been touched by the devotion of the undertaker's daughter in Coal Creek. "I don't mind being under obligations to you," he said; "I don't know any one else I would take it from."

In the street later the troubled man walked about trying to make new plans for the accomplishment of his purpose. He was annoyed by what he thought to be the dulness of his own brain and he thrust his fist up into the air to look at it in the lamplight. "I'll get ready to use that intelligently," he thought; "a man wants trained brains backed up by a big fist in the struggle I'm going into."

It was then that the man from Ohio walked past with his hands in his pockets and attracted his attention. To McGregor's nostrils came the odour of rich fragrant tobacco. He turned and stood staring at the intruder on his thoughts. "That's what I am going to fight," he growled; "the comfortable well-to-do acceptance of a disorderly world, the smug men who see nothing wrong with a world like this. I would like to frighten them so that they throw their cigars away and run about like ants when you kick over ant hills in the field."



CHAPTER II

McGregor began to attend some classes at Chicago University and walked about among the massive buildings, erected for the most part through the bounty of one of his country's leading business men, wondering why the great centre of learning seemed so little a part of the city. To him the University seemed something entirely apart, not in tune with its surrounding. It was like an expensive ornament worn on the soiled hand of a street urchin. He did not stay there long.

One day he got into disfavour with the professor in one of the classes. He sat in a room among other students, his mind busy with thoughts of the future and of how he might get his movement of the marching men under way. In a chair beside him sat a large girl with blue eyes and hair like yellow wheat. She like McGregor was unconscious of what was going on about her and sat with half-closed eyes watching him. In the corners of her eyes lurked a gleam of amusement. She drew sketches of his huge mouth and nose on a pad of Paper.

At McGregor's left with his legs sprawled into the aisle sat a youth who was thinking of the yellow-haired girl and planning a campaign against her. His father was a manufacturer of berry boxes in a brick building on the West Side and he wished he were in school in another city so that it would not be necessary to live at home. All day he thought of the evening meal and of the coming of his father, nervous and tired, to quarrel with his mother about the management of the servants. Now he was trying to evolve a plan for getting money from his mother with which to enjoy a dinner at a downtown restaurant. With delight he contemplated such an evening with a box of cigarettes on the table and the yellow-haired girl sitting opposite him under red lights. He was a typical American youth of the upper middle class and was in the University only because he was in no hurry to begin his life in the commercial world.

In front of McGregor sat another typical student, a pale nervous young man who drummed with his fingers on the back of a book. He was very serious about acquiring learning and when the professor paused in his talk he threw up his hands and asked a question. When the professor smiled he laughed loudly. He was like an instrument on which the professor struck chords.

The professor, a short man with a bushy black beard, heavy shoulders and large powerful eye-glasses, spoke in a shrill voice surcharged with excitement.

"The world is full of unrest," he said; "men are struggling like chicks in the shell. In the hinterland of every man's mind uneasy thoughts stir. I call your attention to what is going on in the Universities of Germany."

The professor paused and glared about. McGregor was so irritated by what he took to be the wordiness of the man that he could not restrain himself. He felt as he had felt when the socialist orator talked on the streets of Coal Creek. With an oath he arose and kicked out his foot to push his chair away. The pad of paper fell out of the large girl's lap and scattered its leaves about the floor. A light burned in McGregor's blue eyes. As he stood in the classroom before the startled class his head, big and red, had something of nobility about it like the head of a fine beast. His voice rumbled out of his throat and the girl looked at him, her mouth standing open.

"We go from room to room hearing talk," began McGregor. "On the street corners downtown in the evenings and in towns and villages men talk and talk. Books are written, jaws wag. The jaws of men are loose. They wabble about—saying nothing."

McGregor's excitement grew. "If there is all this unrest why does it not come to something?" he demanded. "Why do not you who have trained brains strive to find the secret of order in the midst of this disorder? Why is something not done?"

The professor ran up and down on the platform. "I do not know what you mean," he cried nervously. McGregor turned slowly and stared at the class. He tried to explain. "Why do not men lead their lives like men?" he asked. "They must be taught to march, hundreds of thousands of men. Do you not think so?"

McGregor's voice rose and his great fist was raised. "The world should become a great camp," he cried. "The brains of the world should be at the organisation of mankind. Everywhere there is disorder and men chatter like monkeys in a cage. Why should some man not begin the organisation of a new army? If there are men who do not understand what is meant let them be knocked down."

The professor leaned forward and peered through his spectacles at McGregor. "I understand your kind," he said, and his voice trembled. "The class is dismissed. We deprecate violence here."

The professor hurried through a door and down a long hallway with the class chattering at his heels. McGregor sat in his chair in the empty class room and stared at the wall. As the professor hurried away he muttered to himself: "What's getting in here? What's getting into our schools?"

* * * * *

Late on the following afternoon McGregor sat in his room thinking of what had happened in the class. He had decided that he would not spend any more time at the University but would devote himself entirely to the study of law. Several young men came in.

Among the students at the University McGregor had seemed very old. Secretly he was much admired and had often been the subject of talk. Those who had now come to see him wanted him to join a Greek Letter Fraternity. They sat about his room, on the window sill and on a trunk by the wall. They smoked pipes and were boyishly eager and enthusiastic. A glow shone in the cheeks of the spokesman—a clean- looking youth with black curly hair and round pink—and—white cheeks, the son of a Presbyterian minister from Iowa.

"You have been picked by our fellows to be one of us," said the spokesman. "We want you to become an Alpha Beta Pi. It is a grand fraternity with chapters in the best schools in the country. Let me tell you."

He began reeling off a list of names of statesmen, college professors, business men and well known athletes who belonged to the order.

McGregor sat by the wall looking at his guests and wondering what he would say. He was a little amused and half hurt and felt like a man who has had a Sunday School scholar stop him on the street to ask him about the welfare of his soul. He thought of Edith Carson waiting for him in her store on Monroe Street, of the angry miners standing in the saloon in Coal Creek plotting to break into the restaurant while he sat with the hammer in his hands waiting for battle, of old Mother Misery walking at the heels of the soldiers' horses through the streets of the mining village, and last of all of the terrible certainty that these bright-eyed boys would be destroyed, swallowed up by the huge commercial city in which they were to live.

"It means a lot to be one of us when a chap gets out into the world," the curly-haired youth said. "It helps you get on, get in with the right people. You can't go on without men you know. You ought to get in with the best fellows." He hesitated and looked at the floor. "I don't mind telling you," he said with an outburst of frankness, "that one of our stronger men—Whiteside, the mathematician—wanted us to have you. He said you were worth while. He thought you ought to see us and get to know us and that we ought to see and get to know you."

McGregor got up and took his hat from a nail on the wall. He felt the utter futility of trying to express what was in his mind and walked down the stairs to the street with the file of boys following in embarrassed silence and stumbling in the darkness of the hallway at his heels. At the street door he stopped and faced them, struggling to put his thoughts into words.

"I can't do what you ask," he said. "I like you and like your asking me to come in with you, but I'm going to quit the University." His voice softened. "I would like to have you for friends," he added. "You say a man needs to know people after awhile. Well, I would like to know you while you are what you are now. I don't want to know you after you become what you will become."

McGregor turned and ran down the remaining steps to the stone sidewalk and went rapidly up the street. A stern hard look was in his face and he knew he would spend a silent night thinking of what had happened. "I hate hitting boys," he thought as he hurried away to his evening's work at the restaurant.



CHAPTER III

When McGregor was admitted to the bar and ready to take his place among the thousands of young lawyers scattered over the Chicago loop district he half drew back from beginning the practice of his profession. To spend his life quibbling over trifles with other lawyers was not what he wanted. To have his place in life fixed by his ability in quibbling seemed to him hideous.

Night after night he walked alone in the streets thinking of the matter. He grew angry and swore. Sometimes he was so stirred by the meaninglessness of whatever way of life offered itself that he was tempted to leave the city and become a tramp, one of the hordes of adventurous dissatisfied souls who spend their lives drifting back and forth along the American railroads.

He continued to work in the South State Street restaurant that got its patronage from the underworld. In the evenings from six until twelve trade was quiet and he sat reading books and watching the restless thrashing crowds that passed the window. Sometimes he became so absorbed that one of the guests sidled past and escaped through the door without paying his bill. In State Street the people moved up and down nervously, wandering here and there, going without purpose like cattle confined in a corral. Women in cheap imitations of the gowns worn by their sisters two blocks away in Michigan Avenue and with painted faces leered at the men. In gaudily lighted store-rooms that housed cheap suggestive shows pianos kept up a constant din.

In the eyes of the people who idled away the evenings in South State Street was the vacant purposeless stare of modern life accentuated and made horrible. With the stare went the shuffling walk, the wagging jaw, the saying of words meaning nothing. On the wall of a building opposite the door of the restaurant hung a banner marked "Socialist Headquarters." There where modern life had found well-nigh perfect expression, where there was no discipline and no order, where men did not move, but drifted like sticks on a sea-washed beach, hung the socialist banner with its promise of the co-operative commonwealth.

McGregor looked at the banner and at the moving people and was lost in meditation. Walking from behind the cashier's desk he stood in the street by the door and stared about. A fire began to burn in his eyes and the fists that were thrust into his coat pockets were clenched. Again as when he was a boy in Coal Creek he hated the people. The fine love of mankind that had its basis in a dream of mankind galvanised by some great passion into order and meaning was lost.

In the restaurant after midnight trade briskened Waiters and bartenders from fashionable restaurants of the loop district began to drop in to meet friends from among the women of the town. When a woman came in she walked up to one of these young men. "What kind of a night have you had?" they asked each other.

The visiting waiters stood about and talked in low tones. As they talked they absentmindedly practised the art of withholding money from customers, a source of income to them. They played with coins, pitched them into the air, palmed them, made them appear and disappear with marvellous rapidity. Some of them sat on stools along the counter eating pie and drinking cups of hot coffee.

A cook clad in a long dirty apron came into the room from the kitchen and putting a dish on the counter stood eating its contents. He tried to win the admiration of the idlers by boasting. In a blustering voice he called familiarly to women seated at tables along the wall. At some time in his life the cook had worked for a travelling circus and he talked continually of his adventures on the road, striving to make himself a hero in the eyes of his audience.

McGregor read the book that lay before him on the counter and tried to forget the squalid disorder of his surroundings. Again he read of the great figures of history, the soldiers and statesmen who have been leaders of men. When the cook asked him a question or made some remark intended for his ears he looked up, nodded and read again. When a disturbance started in the room he growled out a command and the disturbance subsided. From time to time well dressed middle-aged men, half gone in drink, came and leaned over the counter to whisper to him. He made a motion with his hand to one of the women sitting at the tables along the wall and idly playing with toothpicks. When she came to him he pointed to the man and said, "He wants to buy you a dinner."

The women of the underworld sat at the tables and talked of McGregor, each secretly wishing he might become her lover. They gossiped like suburban wives, filling their talk with vague reference to things he had said. They commented upon his clothes and his reading. When he looked at them they smiled and stirred uneasily about like timid children.

One of the women of the underworld, a thin woman with hollow red cheeks, sat at a table talking with the other women of the raising of white leghorn chickens. She and her husband, a fat old roan, a waiter in a loop restaurant, had bought a ten-acre farm in the country and she was helping to pay for it with the money made in the streets in the evening. A small black-eyed woman who sat beside the chicken raiser reached up to a raincoat hanging on the wall and taking a piece of white cloth from the pocket began to work out a design in pale blue flowers for the front of a shirtwaist. A youth with unhealthy looking skin sat on a stool by the counter talking to a waiter.

"The reformers have raised hell with business," the youth boasted as he looked about to be sure of listeners. "I used to have four women working for me here in State Street in World's Fair year and now I have only one and she crying and sick half the time."

McGregor stopped reading the book. "In every city there is a vice spot, a place from which diseases go out to poison the people. The best legislative brains in the world have made no progress against this evil," it said.

He closed the book, threw it away from him and looked at his big fist lying on the counter and at the youth talking boastfully to the waiter. A smile played about the corners of his mouth. He opened and closed his fist reflectively. Then taking a law book from a shelf below the counter he began reading again, moving his lips and resting his head upon his hands.

McGregor's law office was upstairs over a secondhand clothing store in Van Buren Street. There he sat at his desk reading and waiting and at night he returned to the State Street restaurant. Now and then he went to the Harrison Street police station to hear a police court trial and through the influence of O'Toole was occasionally given a case that netted him a few dollars. He tried to think that the years spent in Chicago were years of training. In his own mind he knew what he wanted to do but did not know how to begin. Instinctively he waited. He saw the march and countermarch of events in the lives of the people tramping on the sidewalks below his office window, saw in his mind the miners of the Pennsylvania village coming down from the hills to disappear below the ground, looked at the girls hurrying through the swinging doors of department stores in the early morning, wondering which of them would presently sit idling with toothpicks in O'Toole's and waited for the word or the stir on the surface of that sea of humanity that would be a sign to him. To an onlooker he might have seemed but another of the wasted men of modern life, a drifter on the sea of things—but it was not so. The people plunging through the streets afire with earnestness concerning nothing had not succeeded in sucking him into the whirlpool of commercialism in which they struggled and into which year after year the best of America's youth was drawn.

The idea that had come into his mind as he sat on the hill above the mining town grew and grew. Day and night he dreamed of the actual physical phenomena of the men of labour marching their way into power and of the thunder of a million feet rocking the world and driving the great song of order purpose and discipline into the soul of Americans.

Sometimes it seemed to him that the dream would never be more than a dream. In the dusty little office he sat and tears came into his eyes. At such times he was convinced that mankind would go on forever along the old road, that youth would continue always to grow into manhood, become fat, decay and die with the great swing and rhythm of life a meaningless mystery to them. "They will see the seasons and the planets marching through space but they will not march," he muttered, and went to stand by the window and stare down into the dirt and disorder of the street below.



CHAPTER IV

In the office McGregor occupied in Van Buren Street there was another desk besides his own. The desk was owned by a small man with an extraordinary long moustache and with grease spots on the lapel of his coat. In the morning he came in and sat in his chair with his feet on his desk. He smoked long black stogies and read the morning papers. On the glass panel of the door was the inscription, "Henry Hunt, Real Estate Broker." When he had finished with the morning papers he disappeared, returning tired and dejected late in the afternoon.

The real estate business of Henry Hunt was a myth. Although he bought and sold no property he insisted on the title and had in his desk a pile of letterheads setting forth the kind of property in which he specialised. He had a picture of his daughter, a graduate of the Hyde Park High School, in a glass frame on the wall. When he went out at the door in the morning he paused to look at McGregor and said, "If any one comes in about property tend to them for me. I'll be gone for a while."

Henry Hunt was a collector of tithes for the political bosses of the first ward. All day he went from place to place through the ward interviewing women, checking their names off a little red book he carried in his pocket, promising, demanding, making veiled threats. In the evening he sat in his flat overlooking Jackson Park and listened to his daughter play on the piano. With all his heart he hated his place in life and as he rode back and forth to town on the Illinois Central trains he stared at the lake and dreamed of owning a farm and living a free life in the country. In his mind he could see the merchants standing gossiping on the sidewalk before the stores in an Ohio village where he had lived as a boy and in fancy saw himself again a boy, driving cows through the village street in the evening and making a delightful little slap slap with his bare feet in the deep dust.

It was Henry Hunt in his secret office as collector and lieutenant to the "boss" of the first ward who shifted the scenes for McGregor's appearance as a public character in Chicago.

One night a young man—son of one of the city's plunging millionaire wheat speculators—was found dead in a little blind alley back of a resort known as Polk Street Mary's place. He lay crumpled up against a board fence quite dead and with a bruise on the side of his head. A policeman found him and dragged him to the street light at the corner of the alley.

For twenty minutes the policeman had been standing under the light swinging his stick. He had heard nothing. A young man came up, touched him on the arm and whispered to him. When he turned to go down the alley the young man ran away up the street.

* * * * *

The powers that rule the first ward in Chicago were furious when the identity of the dead man became known. The "boss," a mild-looking blue-eyed little man in a neat grey suit and with a silky moustache, stood in his office opening and closing his fists convulsively. Then he called a young man and sent for Henry Hunt and a well known police official.

For some weeks the newspapers of Chicago had been conducting a campaign against vice. Swarms of reporters had over-run the ward. Daily they issued word pictures of life in the underworld. On the front pages of the papers with senators and governors and millionaires who had divorced their wives, appeared also the names of Ugly Brown Chophouse Sam and Carolina Kate with descriptions of their places, their hours of closing and the class and quantity of their patronage. A drunken man rolled on the floor at the back of a Twenty-second Street saloon and robbed of his pocketbook had his picture on the front page of the morning papers.

Henry Hunt sat in his office on Van Buren Street trembling with fright. He expected to see his name in the paper and his occupation disclosed.

The powers that ruled the First—quiet shrewd men who knew how to make and to take profits, the very flower of commercialism—were frightened. They saw in the prominence of the dead man a real opportunity for their momentary enemies the press. For weeks they had been sitting quietly, weathering the storm of public disapproval. In their minds they thought of the ward as a kingdom in itself, something foreign and apart from the city. Among their followers were men who had not been across the Van Buren Street line into foreign territory for years.

Suddenly through the minds of these men floated a menace. Like the small soft-speaking boss the ward gripped its fist conclusively. Through the streets and alleys ran a cry, a warning. Like birds of prey disturbed in their nesting places they fluttered, uttering cries. Throwing his stogie into the gutter Henry Hunt ran through the ward. From house to house he uttered his cry—"Lay low! Pull off nothing."

The little boss in his office at the front of his saloon looked from Henry Hunt to the police official. "It is no time for hesitation," he said. "It will prove a boon if we act quickly. We have got to arrest and try that murderer and do it now. Who is our man? Quick. Let's have action."

Henry Hunt lighted a fresh stogie. He played nervously with the ends of his fingers and wished he were out of the ward and safely out of range of the prying eyes of the press. In fancy he could hear his daughter screaming with horror at the sight of his name spread in glaring letters before the world and thought of her with a flush of abhorrence on her young face turning from him forever. In his terror his mind darted here and there. A name sprang to his lips. "It might have been Andy Brown," he said, puffing at the stogie.

The little boss whirled his chair about. He began picking up the papers scattered about his desk. When he spoke his voice was again soft and mild. "It was Andy Brown," he said. "Whisper the word about. Let a Tribune man locate Brown for you. Handle this right and you will save your own scalp and get the fool papers off the back of the First."

* * * * *

The arrest of Brown brought respite to the ward. The prediction of the shrewd little boss made good. The newspapers dropped the clamorous cry for reform and began demanding instead the life of Andrew Brown. Newspaper artists rushed into police headquarters and made hurried sketches to appear an hour later blazoned across the face of extras on the streets. Grave scientific men got their pictures printed at the heads of articles on "Criminal Characteristics of the Head and Face."

An adept and imaginative writer for an afternoon paper spoke of Brown as a Jekyll and Hyde of the Tenderloin and hinted at other murders by the same hand. From the comparatively quiet life of a not markedly industrious yeggman Brown came out of the upper floor of a State Street lodging house to stand stoically before the world of men—a storm centre about which swirled and eddied the wrath of an aroused city.

The thought that had flashed into the mind of Henry Hunt as he sat in the office of the soft-voiced boss was the making of an opportunity for McGregor. For months he and Andrew Brown had been friends. The yeggman, a strongly built slow talking man, looked like a skilled mechanic of a locomotive engineer. Coming into O'Toole's in the quiet hours between eight and twelve he sat eating his evening meal and talking in a half bantering humorous vein to the young lawyer. In his eyes lurked a kind of hard cruelty tempered by indolence. It was he who gave McGregor the name that still clings to him in that strange savage land—"Judge Mac, the Big 'un."

When he was arrested Brown sent for McGregor and offered to give him charge of his case. When the young lawyer refused he was insistent. In a cell at the county jail they talked it over. By the door stood a guard watching them. McGregor peered into the half darkness and said what he thought should be said. "You are in a hole," he began. "You don't want me, you want a big name. They're all set to hang you over there." He waved his hand in the direction of the First. "They're going to hand you over as an answer to a stirred up city. It's a job for the biggest and best criminal lawyer in town. Name the man and I'll get him for you and help raise the money to pay him."

Andrew Brown got up and walked to McGregor. Looking down at him he spoke quickly and determinedly. "You do what I say," he growled. "You take this case. I didn't do the job. I was asleep in my room when it was pulled off. Now you take the case. You won't clear me. It ain't in the cards. But you get the job just the same."

He sat down again upon the iron cot at the corner of the cell. His voice became slow and had in it a touch of cynical humour. "Look here, Big 'un," he said, "the gang's picked my number out of the hat. I'm going across but there's good advertising in the job for some one and you get it."



CHAPTER V

The trial of Andrew Brown was both an opportunity and a test for McGregor. For a number of years he had lived a lonely life in Chicago. He had made no friends and his mind had not been confused by the endless babble of small talk on which most of us subsist. Evening after evening he had walked alone through the streets and had stood at the door of the State Street restaurant a solitary figure aloof from life. Now he was to be drawn into the maelstrom. In the past he had been let alone by life. The great blessing of isolation had been his and in his isolation he had dreamed a big dream. Now the quality of the dream and the strength of its hold upon him was to be tested.

McGregor was not to escape the influence of the life of his day. Deep human passion lay asleep in his big body. Before the time of his Marching Men he had yet to stand the most confusing of all the modern tests of men, the beauty of meaningless women and the noisy clamour of success that is equally meaningless.

On the day of his conversation with Andrew Brown in the old Cook County jail on Chicago's North Side we are therefore to think of McGregor as facing these tests. After the talk with Brown he walked along the street and came to the bridge that led over the river into the loop district. In his heart he knew that he was facing a fight and the thought thrilled him. With a new lift to his shoulders he walked over the bridge. He looked at the people and again let his heart be filled with contempt for them.

He wished that the fight for Brown were a fight with fists. Boarding a west side car he sat looking out through the car window at the passing crowd and imagined himself among them, striking right and left, gripping throats, demanding the truth that would save Brown and set himself up before the eyes of men.

When McGregor got to the Monroe Street millinery store it was evening and Edith was preparing to go out to the evening meal. He stood looking at her. In his voice rang a note of triumph. Out of his contempt for the men and women of the underworld came boastfulness. "They have given me a job they think I can't do," he said. "I'm to be Brown's counsel in the big murder case." He put his hands on her frail shoulders and pulled her to the light. "I'm going to knock them over and show them," he boasted. "They think they're going to hang Brown— the oily snakes. Well they didn't count on me. Brown doesn't count on me. I'm going to show them." He laughed noisily in the empty shop.

At a little restaurant McGregor and Edith talked of the test he was to go through. As he talked she sat in silence and looked at his red hair.

"Find out if your man Brown has a sweetheart," she said, thinking of herself.

* * * * *

America is the land of murders. Day after day in cities and towns and on lonely country roads violent death creeps upon men. Undisciplined and disorderly in their way of life the citizens can do nothing. After each murder they cry out for new laws which, when they are written into the books of laws, the very lawmaker himself breaks. Harried through life by clamouring demands, their days leave them no time for the quietude in which thoughts grow. After days of meaningless hurry in the city they jump upon trains or street cars and hurry through their favourite paper to the ball game, the comic pictures and the market reports.

And then something happens. The moment arrives. A murder that might have got a single column on an inner page of yesterday's paper today spreads its terrible details over everything.

Through the streets hurry the restless scurrying newsboys, stirring the crowds with their cries. The men who have passed impatiently the tales of a city's shame snatch the papers and read eagerly and exhaustively the story of a crime.

And into the midst of such a maelstrom of rumours, hideous impossible stories and well-laid plans to defeat the truth, McGregor hurled himself. Day after day he wandered through the vice district south of Van Buren Street. Prostitutes, pimps, thieves and saloon hangers-on looked at him and smiled knowingly. As the days passed and he made no progress he became desperate. One day an idea came to him. "I'll go to the good looking woman at the settlement house," he told himself. "She won't know who killed the boy but she can find out. I'll make her find out."

* * * * *

In Margaret Ormsby McGregor was to know what was to him a new kind of womanhood, something sure, reliant, hedged about and prepared as a good soldier is prepared, to have the best of it in the struggle for existence. Something he had not known was yet to make its cry to the man.

Margaret Ormsby like McGregor himself had not been defeated by life. She was the daughter of David Ormsby, head of the great plough trust with headquarters in Chicago, a man who because of a certain fine assurance in his attitude toward life had been called "Ormsby the Prince" by his associates. Her mother Laura Ormsby was small nervous and intense.

With a self-conscious abandonment, lacking just a shade of utter security, Margaret Ormsby, beautiful in body and beautifully clad, went here and there among the outcasts of the First Ward. She like all women was waiting for an opportunity of which she did not talk even to herself. She was something for the single-minded and primitive McGregor to approach with caution.

Hurrying along a narrow street lined with cheap saloons McGregor went in at the door of the settlement house and sat in a chair at a desk facing Margaret Ormsby. He knew something of her work in the First Ward and that she was beautiful and self-possessed. He was determined that she should help him. Sitting in the chair and looking at her across the flat-top desk he choked back into her throat the terse sentences with which she was wont to greet visitors.

"It is all very well for you to sit there dressed up and telling me what women in your position can do and can't do," he said, "but I've come here to tell you what you will do if you are of the kind that want to be useful."

The speech of McGregor was a challenge which Margaret, the modern daughter of one of our modern great men, could not well let pass. Had she not brazened out her timidity to go calmly among prostitutes and sordid muttering drunkards, serene in her consciousness of business- like purpose? "What is it you want?" she asked sharply.

"You have just two things that will help me," said McGregor; "your beauty and your virginity. These things are a kind of magnet, drawing the women of the street to you. I know. I've heard them talk.

"There are women who come in here who know who it was killed that boy in the passageway and why it was done," McGregor went on. "You're a fetish with these women. They are children and they come in here to look at you as children peep around curtains at guests sitting in the parlour of their houses.

"Well I want you to call these children into the room and let them tell you family secrets. The whole ward here knows the story of that killing. The air is filled with it. The men and women keep trying to tell me, but they're afraid. The police have them scared and they half-tell me and then run away like frightened animals.

"I want them to tell you. You don't count with the police down here. They think you're too beautiful and too good to touch the real life of these people. None of them—the bosses or the police—are watching you. I'll keep kicking up dust and you get the information I want. You can do the job if you're any good."

After McGregor's speech the woman sat in silence and looked at him. For the first time she had met a man who overwhelmed her and was in no way diverted by her beauty nor her self—possession. A hot wave, half anger, half admiration, swept over her.

McGregor stared at the woman and waited. "I've got to have facts," he said. "Give me the story and the names of those who know the story and I'll make them tell. I have some facts now—got them by bullying a girl and by choking a bartender in an alley. Now I want you in your way to put me in the way of getting more facts. You make the women talk and tell you and then you tell me."

When McGregor had gone Margaret Ormsby got up from her desk in the settlement house and walked across the city toward her father's office. She was startled and frightened. In a moment and by the speech and manner of this brutal young lawyer she had been made to realise that she was but a child in the hands of the forces that played about her in the First Ward. Her self—possession was shaken. "If they are children—these women of the town—then I am a child, a child swimming with them in a sea of hate and ugliness."

A new thought came into her mind. "But he is no child—that McGregor. He is a child of nothing. He stands on a rock unshaken."

She tried to become indignant because of the blunt frankness of the man's speech. "He talked to me as he would have talked to a woman of the streets," she thought. "He was not afraid to assume that at bottom we are alike, just playthings in the hands of the man who dares."

In the street she stopped and looked about. Her body trembled and she realised that the forces about her had become living things ready to pounce upon her. "Anyway, I will do what I can. I will help him. I will have to do that," she whispered to herself.



CHAPTER VI

The clearing of Andrew Brown made a sensation in Chicago. At the trial McGregor was able to introduce one of those breath-taking dramatic climaxes that catch the attention of the mob. At the tense dramatic moment of the trial a frightened hush fell upon the court room and that evening in their houses men turned instinctively from the reading of the papers to look at their beloved sitting about them. A chill of fear ran over the bodies of women. For a moment Beaut McGregor had given them a peep under the crust of civilisation that awoke an age- old trembling in their hearts. In his fervour and impatience McGregor had cried out, not against the incidental enemies of Brown but against all modern society and its formlessness. To the listeners it seemed that he shook mankind by the throat and that by the power and purposefulness of his own solitary figure he revealed the pitiful weakness of his fellows.

In the court room McGregor had sat, grim and silent, letting the State build up its case. In his face was a challenge. His eyes looked out from beneath swollen eyelids. For weeks he had been as tireless as a bloodhound running through the First Ward and building his case. Policemen had seen him emerge from alleyways at three in the morning, the soft spoken boss hearing of his activities had eagerly questioned Henry Hunt, a bartender in a dive on Polk Street had felt the grip of a hand at his throat and a trembling girl of the town had knelt before him in a little dark room begging protection from his wrath. In the court room he sat waiting and watching.

When the special counsel for the State, a man of great name in the courts, had finished his insistent persistent cry for the blood of the silent unemotional Brown, McGregor acted. Springing to his feet he shouted hoarsely across the silent court room to a large woman sitting among the witnesses. "They have tricked you Mary," he roared. "The tale about the pardon after the excitement dies is a lie. They're stringing you. They're going to hang Andy Brown. Get up there and tell the naked truth or his blood be on your hands."

A furor arose in the crowded court room. Lawyers sprang to their feet, objecting, protesting. Above the noise arose a hoarse accusing voice. "Keep Polk Street Mary and every woman from her place in here," he shouted. "They know who killed your man. Put them back there on the stand. They'll tell. Look at them. The truth is coming out of them."

The clamour in the room subsided. The silent red-haired attorney, the joke of the case, had scored. Walking in the streets at night the words of Edith Carson had come back into his brain, and with the help of Margaret Ormsby he had been able to follow a clue given by her suggestion.

"Find out if your man Brown has a sweetheart."

In a moment he saw the message the women of the underworld, patrons of O'Toole's, had been trying to convey to him. Polk Street Mary was the sweetheart of Andy Brown. Now in the silent court room the voice of a woman arose broken with sobs. To the listening crowd in the packed little room came the story of the tragedy in the darkened house before which stood the policeman idly swinging his night stick—the story of a girl from an Illinois village procured and sold to the broker's son —of the desperate struggle in the little room between the eager lustful man and the frightened brave-hearted girl—of the blow with the chair in the hands of the girl that brought death to the man—of the women of the house trembling on the stairs and the body hastily pitched into the passageway.

"They told me they would get Andy off when this blew over," wailed the woman.

* * * * *

McGregor went out of the court room into the street. The glow of victory was on him and he strode along with his heart beating high. His way led over a bridge into the North Side and in his wanderings he passed the apple warehouse where he had made his start in the city and where he had fought with the German. When night came he walked in North Clark Street and heard the newsboys shouting of his victory. Before him danced a new vision, a vision of himself as a big figure in the city. Within himself he felt the power to stand forth among men, to outwit them and outfight them, to get for himself power and place in the world.

The miner's son was half drunk with the new sense of achievement that swept in on him. Out of Clark Street he went and walked east along a residence street to the lake. By the lake he saw a street of great houses surrounded by gardens and the thought came that at some time he might have such a house of his own. The disorderly clatter of modern life seemed very far away. When he came to the lake he stood in the darkness thinking of the useless rowdy of the mining town suddenly become a great lawyer in the city and the blood ran swiftly through his body. "I am to be one of the victors, one of the few who emerge," he whispered to himself and with a jump of the heart thought also of Margaret Ormsby looking at him with her fine questioning eyes as he stood before the men in the court room and by the force of his personality pushed his way through a fog of lies to victory and truth.



BOOK V



CHAPTER I

Margaret Ormsby was a natural product of her age and of American social life in our times. As an individual she was lovely. Although her father David Ormsby the plough king had come up to his position and his wealth out of obscurity and poverty and had known during his early life what it was to stand face to face with defeat, he had made it his business to see that his daughter had no such experience. The girl had been sent to Vassar, she had been taught to catch the fine distinction between clothes that are quietly and beautifully expensive and clothes that merely look expensive, she knew how to enter a room and how to leave a room and had also a strong well trained body and an active mind. Added to these things she had, without the least knowledge of life, a vigorous and rather high handed confidence in her ability to meet life.

During the years spent in the eastern college Margaret had made up her mind that whatever happened she was not going to let her life be dull or uninteresting. Once when a girl friend from Chicago came to the college to visit her the two went for a day out of doors and sat down upon a hillside to talk things over. "We women have been fools," Margaret had declared. "If Father and Mother think that I am going to come home and marry some stick of a man they are mistaken. I have learned to smoke cigarettes and have had my share of a bottle of wine. That may not mean anything to you. I do not think it amounts to much either but it expresses something. It fairly makes me ill when I think of how men have always patronised women. They want to keep evil things away from us—Bah! I am sick of that idea and a lot of the other girls here feel the same way. What right have they? I suppose some day some little whiffit of a business man will set himself up to take care of me. He had better not. I tell you there is a new kind of women growing up and I am going to be one of them. I am going to adventure, to taste life strongly and deeply. Father and Mother might as well make up their minds to that."

The excited girl had walked up and down before her companion, a mild looking young woman with blue eyes, and had raised her hands above her head as though to strike a blow. Her body was like the body of a fine young animal standing alert to meet an enemy and her eyes reflected the intoxication of her mood. "I want all of life," she cried; "I want the lust and the strength and the evil of it. I want to be one of the new women, the saviours of our sex."

Between David Ormsby and his daughter there was an unusual bond. Six foot three, blue eyed, broad shouldered, his presence had a strength and dignity which marked him out among men and the daughter sensed his strength. She was right in that. In his way the man was inspired. Under his eye the trivialities of plough-making had become the details of a fine art. In the factory he never lost the air of command which inspires confidence. Foremen running into the office filled with excitement because of a break in the machinery or an accident to a workman returned to do his bidding quietly and efficiently. Salesmen going from village to village to sell ploughs became under his influence filled with the zeal of missionaries carrying the gospel to the unenlightened. Stockholders of the plough company rushing to him with rumours of coming business disaster stayed to write checks for new assessments on their stock. He was a man who gave men back their faith in business and their faith in men.

To David plough-making was an end in life. Like other men of his type he had other interests but they were secondary. In secret he thought of himself as capable of a broader culture than most of his daily associates and without letting it interfere with his efficiency tried to keep in touch with the thoughts and movements of the world by reading. After the longest and hardest day in the office he sometimes spent half the night over a book in his room.

As Margaret Ormsby grew into womanhood she was a constant source of anxiety to her father. To him it seemed that she had passed from an awkward and rather jolly girlhood into a peculiarly determined new kind of womanhood over night. Her adventurous spirit worried him. One day he had sat in his office reading a letter announcing her homecoming. The letter seemed no more than a characteristic outburst from an impulsive girl who had but yesterday fallen asleep at evening in his arms. It confused him to think that an honest ploughmaker should have a letter from his little girl talking of the kind of living that he believed could only lead a woman to destruction.

And then the next day there sat beside him at his table a new and commanding figure demanding his attention. David got up from the table and hurried away to his room. He wanted to readjust his thoughts. On his desk was a photograph brought home by the daughter from school. He had the common experience of being told by the photograph what he had been trying to grasp. Instead of a wife and child there were two women in the house with him.

Margaret had come out of college a thing of beauty in face and figure. Her tall straight well-trained body, her coal-black hair, her soft brown eyes, the air she had of being prepared for life's challenge caught and held the attention of men. There was in the girl something of her father's bigness and not a little of the secret blind desires of her mother. To an attentive household on the night of her arrival she announced her intention of living her life fully and vividly. "I am going to know things I can not get from books," she said. "I am going to touch life at many corners, getting the taste of things in my mouth. You thought me a child when I wrote home saying that I wouldn't be cooped up in the house and married to a tenor in the church choir or to an empty-headed young business man but now you are going to see. I am going to pay the price if necessary, but I am going to live."

In Chicago Margaret set about the business of living as though nothing were needed but strength and energy. In a characteristic American way she tried to hustle life. When the men in her own set looked confused and shocked by the opinions she expressed she got out of her set and made the common mistake of supposing that those who do not work and who talk rather glibly of art and of freedom are by that token free men and artists.

Still she loved and respected her father. The strength in him made an appeal to the native strong-thing in her. To a young socialist writer who lived in the settlement house where she presently went to live and who sought her out to sit by her desk berating men of wealth and position she showed the quality of her ideals by pointing to David Ormsby. "My father, the leader of an industrial trust, is a better man than all of the noisy reformers that ever lived," she declared. "He makes ploughs anyway—makes them well—millions of them. He does not spend his time talking and running his ringers through his hair. He works and his work has lightened the labours of millions while the talkers sit thinking noisy thoughts and getting round-shouldered."

In truth Margaret Ormsby was puzzled. Had she been allowed by a common fellowship in living to be a real sister to all other women and to know their common heritage of defeat, had she like her father when he was a boy but known what it was to walk utterly broken and beaten in the face of men and then to rise again and again to battle with life she would have been splendid.

She did not know. To her mind any kind of defeat had in it a touch of something like immorality. When she saw all about her only a vast mob of defeated and confused human beings trying to make headway in the midst of a confused social organisation she was beside herself with impatience.

The distraught girl turned to her father and tried to get hold of the keynote of his life; "I want you to tell me things," she said, but the father not understanding only shook his head. It did not occur to him to talk to her as to a fine man friend and a kind of bantering half serious companionship sprang up between them. The ploughmaker was happy in the thought that the jolly girl he had known before his daughter went to college had come back to live with him.

After Margaret went to the settlement house she lunched with her father almost every day. The hour together in the midst of the din that filled their lives became for them both a treasured privilege. Day after day they sat for an hour in a fashionable down-town eating place renewing and strengthening their comradeship, laughing and talking amid the crowds, delightful in their intimacy. With each other they playfully took on the air of the two men of affairs, each in turn treating the work of the other as something to be passed over lightly. Secretly neither believed as he talked.

In her effort to get hold of and move the sordid human wrecks floating in and out of the door of the settlement house Margaret thought of her father at his desk directing the making of ploughs. "It is clean and important work," she thought. "He is a big and effective man."

At his desk in the office of the plough trust David thought of his daughter in the settlement house at the edge of the First Ward. "She is a white shining thing amid dirt and ugliness," he thought "Her whole life is like the life of her mother during the hours when she once lay bravely facing death for the sake of a new life."

On the day of her meeting with McGregor, father and daughter sat as usual in the restaurant. Men and women passed up and down the long carpeted aisles and looked at them admiringly. A waiter stood at Ormsby's shoulder anxious for the generous tip. Into the air that hung over them, the little secret atmosphere of comradeship they cherished so carefully, was thrust the sense of a new personality. Floating in Margaret's mind beside the quiet noble face of her father, with its stamp of ability and kindliness, was another face—the face of the man who had talked to her in the settlement house, not as Margaret Ormsby daughter of David Ormsby of the plough trust but as a woman who could serve his ends and whom he meant should serve. The vision in her mind haunted her and she listened indifferently to the talk of her father. She felt that the stern face of the young lawyer with its strong mouth and its air of command was as something impending and tried to get back the feeling of dislike she had felt when first he thrust himself in at the settlement house door. She succeeded only in recalling certain firm lines of purpose that offset and tempered the brutality of his face.

Sitting there in the restaurant opposite her father, where day after day they had tried so hard to build a real partnership in existence, Margaret suddenly burst into tears.

"I have met a man who has compelled me to do what I did not want to do," she explained to the astonished man and then smiled at him through the tears that glistened in her eyes.



CHAPTER II

In Chicago the Ormsbys lived in a large stone house in Drexel Boulevard. The house had a history. It was owned by a banker who was a large stockholder and one of the directors of the plough trust. Like all men who knew him well the banker admired and respected the ability and integrity of David Ormsby. When the ploughmaker came to the city from a town in Wisconsin to be the master of the plough trust he offered him the house to use.

The house had come to the banker from his father, a grim determined old money-making merchant of a past generation who had died hated by half Chicago after toiling sixteen hours daily for sixty years. In his old age the merchant had built the house to express the power wealth had given him. It had floors and woodwork cunningly wrought of expensive woods by workmen sent to Chicago by a firm in Brussels. In the long drawing room at the front of the house hung a chandelier that had cost the merchant ten thousand dollars. The stairway leading to the floor above was from the palace of a prince in Venice and had been bought for the merchant and brought over seas to the house in Chicago.

The banker who inherited the house did not want to live in it. Even before the death of his father and after his own unsuccessful marriage he lived at a down town club. In his old age the merchant, retired from business, lived in the house with another old man, an inventor. He could not rest although he had given up business with that end in view. Digging a trench in the lawn at the back of the house he with his friend spent his days trying to reduce the refuse of one of his factories to something having commercial value. Fires burned in the trench and at night the grim old man, hands covered with tar, sat in the house under the chandelier. After the death of the merchant the house stood empty, staring at passers-by in the street, its walks and paths overgrown with weeds and rank grass.

David Ormsby fitted into his house. Walking through the long halls or sitting smoking his cigar in an easy chair on the wide lawn he looked arrayed and environed. The house became a part of him like a well-made and intelligently worn suit of clothes. Into the drawing room under the ten thousand dollar chandelier he moved a billiard table and the click of ivory balls banished the churchliness of the place.

Up and down the stairway moved American girls, friends of Margaret, their skirts rustling and their voices running through the huge rooms. In the evening after dinner David played billiards. The careful calculation of the angles and the English interested him. Playing in the evening with Margaret or with a man friend the fatigue of the day passed and his honest voice and reverberating laugh brought a smile to the lips of people passing in the street. In the evening David brought his friends to sit in talk with him on the wide verandas. At times he went alone to his room at the top of the house and buried himself in books. On Saturday evenings he had a debauch and with a group of friends from town sat at a card table in the long parlour playing poker and drinking highballs.

Laura Ormsby, Margaret's mother, had never seemed a real part of the life about her. Even as a child the daughter had thought her hopelessly romantic. Life had treated her too well and from every one about her she expected qualities and reactions which in her own person she would not have tried to achieve.

David had already begun to rise when he married her, the slender brown-haired daughter of a village shoemaker, and even in those days the little plough company with its ownership scattered among the merchants and farmers of the vicinity had started under his hand to make progress in the state. People already spoke of its master as a coming man and of Laura as the wife of a coming man.

To Laura this was in some way unsatisfactory. Sitting at home and doing nothing she had still a passionate wish to be known as a character, an individual, a woman of action. On the street as she walked beside her husband, she beamed upon people but when the same people spoke, calling them a handsome couple, a flush rose to her cheeks and a flash of indignation ran through her brain.

Laura Ormsby lay awake in her bed at night thinking of her life. She had a world of fancies in which she at such times lived. In her dream world a thousand stirring adventures came to her. She imagined a letter received through the mail, telling of an intrigue in which David's name was coupled with that of another woman and lay abed quietly hugging the thought. She looked at the face of the sleeping David tenderly. "Poor hard-pressed boy," she muttered. "I shall be resigned and cheerful and lead him gently back to his old place in my heart."

In the morning after a night spent in this dream world Laura looked at David, so cool and efficient, and was irritated by his efficiency. When he playfully dropped his hand upon her shoulder she drew away and sitting opposite him at breakfast watched him reading the morning paper all unconscious of the rebel thoughts in her mind.

Once after she had moved to Chicago and after Margaret's return from college Laura had the faint suggestion of an adventure. Although it turned out tamely it lingered in her mind and in some way sweetened her thoughts.

She was alone on a sleeping car coming from New York. A young man sat in a seat opposite her and the two fell into talk. As she talked Laura imagined herself eloping with the young man and under her lashes looked sharply at his weak and pleasant face. She kept the talk alive as others in the car crawled away for the night behind the green swaying curtains.

With the young man Laura discussed ideas she had got from reading Ibsen and Shaw. She grew bold and daring in the advancing of opinions and tried to stir the young man to some overt speech or action that might arouse her indignation.

The young man did not understand the middle-aged woman who sat beside him and talked so boldly. He knew of but one prominent man named Shaw and that man had been governor of Iowa and later a member of the cabinet of President McKinley. It startled him to think that a prominent member of the Republican party should have such thoughts or express such opinions. He talked of fishing in Canada and of a comic opera he had seen in New York and at eleven o'clock yawned and disappeared behind the green curtains. As the young man lay in his berth he muttered to himself, "Now what did that woman want?" A thought came into his mind and he reached up to where his trousers swung in a little hammock above the window and looked to see that his watch and pocket-book were still there.

At home Laura Ormsby nursed the thought of the talk with the strange man on the train. In her mind he became something romantic and daring, a streak of light across what she was pleased to think of as her sombre life.

Sitting at dinner she talked of him describing his charms. "He had a wonderful mind and we sat late into the night talking," she said, watching the face of David.

When she had spoken Margaret looked up and said laughingly, "Have a heart Dad. Here is romance. Do not be blind to it. Mother is trying to scare you about an alleged love affair."



CHAPTER III

One evening three weeks after the great murder trial McGregor took a long walk in the streets of Chicago and tried to plan out his life. He was troubled and disconcerted by the event that had crowded in upon the heels of his dramatic success in the court room and more than troubled by the fact that his mind constantly played with the dream of having Margaret Ormsby as his wife. In the city he had become a power and instead of the names and the pictures of criminals and keepers of disorderly houses his name and his picture now appeared on the front pages of newspapers. Andrew Leffingwell, the political representative in Chicago of a rich and successful publisher of sensational newspapers, had visited him in his office and had proposed to make him a political figure in the city. Finley a noted criminal lawyer had offered him a partnership. The lawyer, a small smiling man with white teeth, had not asked McGregor for an immediate decision. In a way he had taken the decision for granted. Smiling genially and rolling a cigar across McGregor's desk he had spent an hour telling stories of famous court room triumphs.

"One such triumph is enough to make a man," he declared. "You have no idea how far such a success will carry you. The word of it keeps running through men's minds. A tradition is built up. The remembrance of it acts upon the minds of jurors. Cases are won for you by the mere connection of your name with the case."

McGregor walked slowly and heavily through the streets without seeing the people. In Wabash Avenue near Twenty-third Street he stopped in a saloon and drank beer. The saloon was in a room below the level of the sidewalk and the floor was covered with sawdust. Two half drunken labourers stood by the bar quarrelling. One of the labourers who was a socialist continually cursed the army and his words started McGregor to thinking of the dream he had so long held and that now seemed fading. "I was in the army and I know what I am talking about," declared the socialist. "There is nothing national about the army. It is a privately owned thing. Here it is secretly owned by the capitalists and in Europe by the aristocracy. Don't tell me—I know. The army is made up of bums. If I'm a bum I became one then. You will see fast enough what fellows are in the army if the country is ever caught and drawn into a great war."

Becoming excited the socialist raised his voice and pounded on the bar. "Hell, we don't know ourselves at all," he cried. "We never have been tested. We call ourselves a great nation because we are rich. We are like a fat boy who has had too much pie. Yes sir—that's what we are here in America and as far as our army goes it is a fat boy's plaything. Keep away from it."

McGregor sat in the corner of the saloon and looked about. Men came in and went out at the door. A child carried a pail down the short flight of steps from the street and ran across the sawdust floor. Her voice, thin and sharp, pierced through the babble of men's voices. "Ten cents' worth—give me plenty," she pleaded, raising the pail above her head and putting it on the bar.

The confident smiling face of Finley the lawyer came back into McGregor's mind. Like David Ormsby the successful maker of ploughs the lawyer looked upon men as pawns in a great game and like the ploughmaker his intentions were honourable and his purpose clear. He was intent upon making much of his life, being successful. If he played the game on the side of the criminal that was but a chance. Things had fallen out so. In his mind was something else—the expression of his own purpose.

McGregor rose and went out of the saloon. In the street men stood about in groups. At Thirty-ninth Street a crowd of youths scuffling on the sidewalk pushed against the tall muttering man who passed with his hat in his hand. He began to feel that he was in the midst of something too vast to be moved by the efforts of any one man. The pitiful insignificance of the individual was apparent. As in a long procession the figures of the individuals who had tried to rise out of the ruck of American life passed before him. With a shudder he realised that for the most part the men whose names filled the pages of American history meant nothing. The children who read of their deeds were unmoved. Perhaps they had only increased the disorder. Like the men passing in the street they went across the face of things and disappeared into the darkness.

"Perhaps Finley and Ormsby are right," he whispered. "They get what they can, they have the good sense to know that life runs quickly like a flying bird passing an open window. They know that if a man thinks of anything else he is likely to become another sentimentalist and spend his life being hypnotised by the wagging of his own jaw."

* * * * *

In his wanderings McGregor came to an out-of-door restaurant and garden far out on the south side. The garden had been built for the amusement of the rich and successful. Upon a little platform a band played. Although the garden was walled about it was open to the sky and above the laughing people seated at the tables shone the stars.

McGregor sat alone at a little table on a balcony beneath a shaded light. Below him along a terrace were other tables occupied by men and women. On a platform in the centre of the garden dancers appeared.

McGregor who had ordered a dinner left it untouched. A tall graceful girl, strongly suggestive of Margaret Ormsby, danced upon the platform. With infinite grace her body gave expression to the movements of the dance and like a thing blown by the wind she moved here and there in the arms of her partner, a slender youth with long black hair. In the figure of the dancing woman there was expressed much of the idealism man has sought to materialise in women and McGregor was thrilled by it. A sensualism so delicate that it did not appear to be sensualism began to invade him. With a new hunger he looked forward to the time when he would again see Margaret.

Upon the platform in the garden appeared other dancers. The lights at the tables were turned low. From the darkness laughter arose. McGregor stared about. The people seated at the tables on the terrace caught and held his attention and he began looking sharply at the faces of the men. How cunning they were, these men who had been successful in life. Were they not after all the wise men? Behind the flesh that had grown so thick upon their bones what cunning eyes. There was a game of life and they had played it. The garden was a part of the game. It was beautiful and did not all that was beautiful in the world end by serving them? The arts of men, the thoughts of men, the impulses toward loveliness that came into the minds of men and women, did not all these things work solely to lighten the hours of the successful? The eyes of the men at the tables as they looked at the women who danced were not too greedy. They were filled with assurance. Was it not for them that the dancers turned here and there revealing their grace? If life was a struggle had they not been successful in the struggle?

McGregor arose from the table and left his food untouched. Near the entrance to the gardens he stopped and leaning against a pillar looked again at the scene before him. Upon the platform appeared a whole troupe of women-dancers. They were dressed in many-coloured garments and danced a folk dance. As McGregor watched a light began to creep back into his eyes. The women who now danced were unlike her who had reminded him of Margaret Ormsby. They were short of stature and there was something rugged in their faces. Back and forth across the platform they moved in masses. By their dancing they were striving to convey a message. A thought came to McGregor. "It is the dance of labour," he muttered. "Here in this garden it is corrupted but the note of labour is not lost. There is a hint of it left in these figures who toil even as they dance."

McGregor moved away from the shadows of the pillar and stood, hat in hand, beneath the garden lights waiting as though for a call out of the ranks of the dancers. How furiously they worked. How the bodies twisted and squirmed. Out of sympathy with their efforts sweat appeared on the face of the man who stood watching. "What a storm must be going on just below the surface of labour," he muttered. "Everywhere dumb brutalised men and women must be waiting for something, not knowing what they want. I will stick to my purpose but I will not give up Margaret," he said aloud, turning and half running out of the garden and into the street.

In his sleep that night McGregor dreamed of a new world, a world of soft phrases and gentle hands that stilled the rising brute in man. It was a world-old dream, the dream out of which such women as Margaret Ormsby have been created. The long slender hands he had seen lying on the desk in the settlement house now touched his hands. Uneasily he rolled about in bed and desire came to him so that he awakened. On the Boulevard people still passed up and down. McGregor arose and stood in the darkness by the window of his room watching. A theatre had just spat forth its portion of richly dressed men and women and when he had opened the window the voices of the women came clear and sharp to his ears.

The distracted man stared into the darkness and his blue eyes were troubled. The vision of the disordered and disorganised band of miners marching silently in the wake of his mother's funeral into whose lives he by some supreme effort was to bring order was disturbed and shattered by the more definite and lovely vision that had come to him.



CHAPTER IV

During the days since she had seen McGregor Margaret had thought of him almost constantly. She weighed and balanced her own inclinations and decided that if the opportunity came she would marry the man whose force and courage had so appealed to her. She was half disappointed that the opposition she had seen in her father's face when she had told him of McGregor and had betrayed herself by her tears did not become more active. She wanted to fight, to defend the man she had secretly chosen. When nothing was said of the matter she went to her mother and tried to explain. "We will have him here," the mother said quickly. "I am giving a reception next week. I will make him the chief figure. Let me have his name and address and I will attend to the matter."

Laura arose and went into the house. A shrewd gleam came into her eyes. "He will act like a fool before our people," she told herself. "He is a brute and will be made to look like a brute." She could not restrain her impatience and sought out David. "He is a man to fear," she said; "he would stop at nothing. You must think of some way to put an end to Margaret's interest in him. Do you know of a better plan than to have him here where he will look the fool?"

David took the cigar from his lips. He felt annoyed and irritated that an affair concerning Margaret had been brought forward for discussion. In his heart he also feared McGregor. "Let it alone," he said sharply. "She is a woman grown and has more judgment and good sense than any other woman I know." He got up and threw the cigar over the veranda into the grass. "Women are not understandable," he half shouted. "They do inexplicable things, have inexplicable fancies. Why do they not go forward along straight lines like a sane man? I years ago gave up understanding you and now I am being compelled to give up understanding Margaret."

* * * * *

At Mrs. Ormsby's reception McGregor appeared arrayed in the black suit he had purchased for his mother's funeral. His flaming red hair and rude countenance arrested the attention of all. About him on all sides crackled talk and laughter. As Margaret had been alarmed and ill at ease in the crowded court room where a fight for life went on, so he among these people who went about uttering little broken sentences and laughing foolishly at nothing, felt depressed and uncertain. In the midst of the company he occupied much the same position as a new and ferocious animal safely caught and now on caged exhibition. They thought it clever of Mrs. Ormsby to have him and he was, in not quite the accepted sense, the lion of the evening. The rumour that he would be there had induced more than one woman to cut other engagements and come to where she could take the hand of and talk with this hero of the newspapers, and the men shaking his hand, looked at him sharply and wondered what power and what cunning lay in him.

In the newspapers after the murder trial a cry had sprung up about the person of McGregor. Fearing to print in full the substance of his speech on vice, its ownership and its significance, they had filled their columns with talk of the man. The huge Scotch lawyer of the Tenderloin was proclaimed as something new and startling in the grey mass of the city's population. Then as in the brave days that followed the man caught irresistibly the imagination of writing men, himself dumb in written or spoken words except in the heat of an inspired outburst when he expressed perfectly that pure brute force, the lust for which sleeps in the souls of artists.

Unlike the men the beautifully gowned women at the reception had no fear of McGregor. They saw in him something to be tamed and conquered and they gathered in groups to engage him in talk and return the inquiring stare in his eyes. They thought that with such an unconquered soul about, life might take on new fervour and interest. Like the women who sat playing with toothpicks in O'Toole's restaurant, more than one of the women at Mrs. Ormsby's reception had a half unconscious wish that such a man might be her lover.

One after another Margaret brought forward the men and women of her world to couple their names with McGregor's and try to establish him in the atmosphere of assurance and ease that pervaded the house and the people. He stood by the wall bowing and staring boldly about and thought that the confusion and distraction of mind that had followed his first visit to Margaret at the settlement house was being increased immeasurably with every passing moment. He looked at the glittering chandelier on the ceiling and at the people moving about— the men at ease, comfortable—the women with wonderfully delicate expressive hands and with their round white necks and shoulders showing above their gowns and a feeling of utter helplessness pervaded him. Never before had he been in a company so feminine. He thought of the beautiful women about him, seeing them in his direct crude and forceful way merely as females at work among males, carrying forward some purpose. "With all the softly suggestive sensuality of their dress and their persons they must in some way have sapped the strength and the purpose of these men who move among them so indifferently," he thought. Within himself he knew of nothing to set up as a defence against what he believed such beauty must become to the man who lived with it. Its power he thought must be something monumental and he looked with admiration at the quiet face of Margaret's father, moving among his guests.

McGregor went out of the house and stood in the half darkness on the veranda. When Mrs. Ormsby and Margaret followed he looked at the older woman and sensed her antagonism. The old love of battle swept in on him and he turned and stood in silence looking at her. "The fine lady," he thought, "is no better than the women of the First Ward. She has an idea I will surrender without a fight."

Out of his mind went the fear of the assurance and stability of Margaret's people that had almost overcome him in the house. The woman who had all her life thought of herself as one waiting only the opportunity to appear as a commanding figure in affairs made by her presence a failure of the effort to submerge McGregor.

* * * * *

On the veranda stood the three people. McGregor the silent became the talkative. Seized with one of the inspirations that were a part of his nature he threw talk about, sparring and returning thrust for thrust with Mrs. Ormsby. When he thought that the time had come for him to get at the thing that was in his mind he went into the house and presently came out carrying his hat. The quality of harshness that crept into his voice when he was excited or determined startled Laura Ormsby. Looking down at her, he said, "I am going to take your daughter for a walk in the street. I want to talk with her."

Laura hesitated and smiled uncertainly. She determined to speak out, to be like the man crude and direct. When she had her mind fixed and ready Margaret and McGregor were already half way down the gravel walk to the gate and the opportunity to distinguish herself had passed.

* * * * *

McGregor walked beside Margaret, absorbed in thoughts of her. "I am engaged in a work here," he said, waving his hand vaguely toward the city. "It is a big work and it takes a lot out of me. I have not come to see you, because I've been uncertain. I've been afraid you would overcome me and drive thoughts of the work out of my head."

By the iron gate at the end of the gravel walk they turned and faced each other. McGregor leaned against the brick wall and looked at her. "I want you to marry me," he said. "I think of you constantly. Thinking of you I can only half do my work. I get to thinking that another man may come and take you and I waste hour after hour being afraid."

She put a trembling hand upon his arm and he thinking to check an attempt at an answer before he had finished, hurried on.

"There are things to be said and understood between us before I can come to you as a suitor. I did not think I should feel toward a woman as I feel toward you and I have certain adjustments to make. I thought I could get along without your kind of women. I thought you were not for me—with the work I have thought out to do in the world. If you will not marry me I'll be glad to know now so that I can get my mind straightened out."

Margaret raised her hand and laid it on his shoulder. The act was a kind of acknowledgment of his right to talk to her so directly. She said nothing. Filled with a thousand messages of love and tenderness she longed to pour into his ear she stood in silence on the gravel path with her hand on his shoulder.

And then an absurd thing happened. The fear that Margaret might come to some quick decision that would affect all of their future together made McGregor frantic. He did not want her to speak and wished his own words unsaid. "Wait. Not now," he cried and threw up his hand intending to take her hand. His fist struck the arm that lay on his shoulder and it in turn knocked his hat flying into the road. McGregor started to run after it and then stopped. He put his hand to his head and appeared lost in thought. When he turned again to pursue the hat Margaret, unable longer to control herself, shouted with laughter.

Hatless, McGregor walked up Drexel Boulevard in the soft stillness of the summer night. He was annoyed at the outcome of the evening and in his heart half wished that Margaret had sent him away defeated. His arms ached to have her against his breast but his mind kept presenting one after another the objections to marriage with her. "Men are submerged by such women and forget their work," he told himself. "They sit looking into the soft brown eyes of their beloved, thinking of happiness. A man should go about his work thinking of that. The fire that runs through the veins of his body should light his mind. One wants to take the love of woman as an end in life and the woman accepts that and is made happy by it." He thought with gratitude of Edith in her shop on Monroe Street. "I do not sit in my room at night dreaming of taking her in my arms and pouring kisses on her lips," he whispered.

* * * * *

In the door of her house Mrs. Ormsby had stood watching McGregor and Margaret. She had seen them stop at the end of the walk. The figure of the man was lost in shadows and that of Margaret stood alone, outlined against a distant light. She saw Margaret's hand thrust out—was she clutching his sleeve—and heard the murmur of voices. And then the man precipitating himself into the street. His hat catapulted ahead of him and a quick outburst of half-hysterical laughter broke the stillness.

Laura Ormsby was furious. Although she hated McGregor she could not bear the thought that laughter should break the spell of romance. "She is just like her father," she muttered. "At least she might show some spirit and not be like a wooden thing, ending her first talk with a lover with a laugh like that."

As for Margaret she stood in the darkness trembling with happiness. She imagined herself going up the dark stairway to McGregor's office in Van Buren Street where once she had gone to take him news of the murder case—laying her hand upon his shoulder and saying, "Take me in your arms and kiss me. I am your woman. I want to live with you. I am ready to renounce my people and my world and to live your life for your sake." Margaret, standing in the darkness before the huge old house in Drexel Boulevard, imagined herself with Beaut McGregor— living with him as his wife in a small apartment over a fish market on a West Side street. Why a fish market she could not have said.



CHAPTER V

Edith Carson was six years older than McGregor and lived entirely within herself. Hers was one of those natures that do not express themselves in words. Although at his coming into the shop her heart beat high no colour came to her cheeks and her pale eyes did not flash back into his a message. Day after day she sat in her shop at work, quiet, strong in her own kind of faith, ready to give her money, her reputation, and if need be her life to the working out of her own dream of womanhood. She did not see in McGregor the making of a man of genius as did Margaret and did not hope to express through him a secret desire for power. She was a working woman and to her he represented all men. In her secret heart she thought of him merely as the man—her man.