There was grim, deadly silence--eating, unbearable silence in that gambling room as they waited the ring of the telephone and the name of the winner. Again the yellow haired madam's voice screamed shrilly out, for she was indeed ill at ease, her money was all on the favorite--"Yes, a bunch of American 'fillies' peddled out at 50 cents an hour to all comers, black or white, sick or sound. No wonder he can make a play like that on an outside chance." Three-hundred dollars! My heart stood still almost. The thought flashed through my brain that that wager meant hundreds of hours of shame and slavery and horror to those girls in the shanties down on Peoria street, some mother's girl, every one of them. I sat still for a little while and watched the feverish anxious throng about me. My heart kept going faster and faster until I could bear it no longer. American "fillies" and body and soul under a brutal Russian whore-monger! I slipped quietly out into the street; night was coming on, and I walked down Madison and south on Peoria. Yes, there were the shanties--poor, wretched hovels, every one of them. Out shone the flickering red lights, out came the discordant, rasping sound of the rented piano, out belched the shrieks and groans of drunken harlots mingled with the curses of task-masters in a foreign tongue, attracting the attention of the hundreds of laborers, negroes and boys, as they walked home on Peoria street from their day's work. On I went until I came to a little shed just north of the slum saloon occupied by one Shellstadt at the corner of Monroe and Peoria streets, and checking my steps, I looked around me on the squalid, wretched scene. I was in the midst of prostitution at its lowest--the heart-breaking dregs of Chicago's thirty thousand public women. Yes, there they were--the fair young American girl, the stolid Russian Jewess, the middle-aged, syphiletic harlot, living, prostituting, dying like so many hurt, broken moths around that great red-light--Chicago's West Side Soul Market--their poor, wrecked, foul smelling bodies sold day and night at from twenty-five to fifty cents an hour to all comers who could pay the pitiful price demanded by their brutal, soulless masters; and, as I looked, the burning fire of intense pity entered my soul for these drug and drink-sodden, diseased and chained slaves--my sisters in Christ and this great, free American Republic, and so, with a heart-consuming desire to know more of the lives of these scarlet women and to help them, if possible, I began at once a thorough personal investigation of Chicago's public Slave Market, visiting these people whenever occasion offered; talking with them, gaining their much abused confidence, until I gradually learned the inside lines of the saddest story America has ever known since the black mothers of our Southland were torn from their black and white babies and with shrieks of agony and heart strings bleeding and soul rent with blackened horror were