"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 passed impatiently the tales of a city's shame
snatch 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. Prostitutes, pimps,
thieves and saloon hangers-on looked at him and smiled knowingly. As the days
passed 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 assurance in his attitude toward
life had been called "Ormsby the Prince" by his associates. 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
