Chicago (Ill.) -- Fiction; City and town life -- Fiction; Coal mines and mining -- Pennsylvania -- Fiction; Labor leaders -- Fiction
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.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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