After a miserable month’s wait, I dug up my money and bought a ticket to Chicago by the way of Denver and Omaha, going a roundabout way for fear of meeting my father and having to face his clear, cold eyes. If it had been honest money I would have gone to him and offered him any part of it, but I was afraid to face him with a lie. I got into Chicago safely and immediately put my fortune in a safety box. Then I bought plenty of good clothes and got myself a nice room near the corner of Clark and Madison Streets. That seemed to be the center of the night life, and I instinctively anchored there. I put in the winter investigating the cheap dives, hurdy-gurdies, and dance halls. The tough Tenderloin district attracted me also. The beer bums and barrel-house five-cent whisky bums came under my notice. Not very different from the winos of San Francisco. I visited the five-cent barber shops of lower Clark Street and the ten-cent “flops” and dime ham-and-bean joints. Nothing escaped me. I nibbled at the faro games, but was careful and never got hurt. Every night I looked into Hinky Dink’s and Bathhouse John’s bars and heard the same old alarm, “here comes the wagon.” But those two kings of the First Ward were “Johnnie on the spot” and never allowed any of “their people” to languish in the “can” overnight. I discovered the saloon of “Mush Mouth” Johnson, a negro politician of power, and, fascinated, watched his patrons, each in turn trying to make the bone dice roll his way. I stumbled upon the hop joint of “California Jack,” an old Chinaman from Sacramento, who was waxing fat in his make-believe laundry in South State Street. Thieves, pickpockets, and pimps and their girls smoked unmolested day or night. Now and then a tired waiter or bartender threw himself wearily on a bunk. I fell in with a wolfish-eyed girl of the streets, hungry and shivering in a doorway, so shabby that men would not throw an appraising glance at her. Like Julia she was almost “ready for the river.” I bought her food and clothes and a room. I gave her no advice and sought no profit from the transaction. With better clothes and food she plied her trade confidently and prospered. I saw her often on the streets. One night she paid me the money I had spent for her. Then came a midnight when she knocked at my door, pale, panting with fear. “You must help me,” she implored. “I have no friend but you. A man is dead in my room. If he is found there the police—you know—they’ll say it’s murder.”