State Street, on the South Side, eager women driven by want sold their
bodies to passersby for twenty-five cents. An advertisement in the
newspapers of one unfilled job brought a thousand men to block the
streets at daylight before a factory door. In the crowds men swore and
knocked each other about. Working-men driven to desperation went forth
into quiet streets and knocking over citizens took their money and
watches and ran trembling into the darkness. A girl of Twenty-fourth
Street was kicked and knocked into the gutter because when attacked by
thieves she had but thirty-five cents in her purse. A professor of the
University of Chicago addressing his class said that, having looked
into the hungry distorted faces of five hundred men clamouring for a
position as dishwasher in a cheap restaurant, he was ready to
pronounce all claims to social advancement in America a figment in the
brains of optimistic fools. A tall awkward man walking up State Street
threw a stone through the window of a store. A policeman hustled him
through the crowd. "You'll get a workhouse sentence for this," he
said.

"You fool that's what I want. I want to make property that won't
employ me feed me," said the tall gaunt man who, trained in the
cleaner and more wholesome poverty of the frontier, might have been a
Lincoln suffering for mankind.

Into this maelstrom of misery and grim desperate want walked Beaut
McGregor of Coal Creek--huge, graceless of body, indolent of mind,
untrained, uneducated, hating the world. Within two days he had
snatched before the very eyes of that hungry marching army three
prizes, three places where a man might by working all day get clothes
to wear upon his back and food to put into his stomach.