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 ident.i.ty 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 cla.s.s and quant.i.ty 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed impatiently the tales of a city"s shame s.n.a.t.c.h 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. Prost.i.tutes, pimps, thieves and saloon hangers-on looked at him and smiled knowingly. As the days pa.s.sed 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 a.s.surance in his att.i.tude toward life had been called "Ormsby the Prince" by his a.s.sociates. 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 pa.s.s. Had she not brazened out her timidity to go calmly among prost.i.tutes 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 pa.s.sageway 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."