“Well I want you to call these children into
the room and let them tell you family secrets.
The whole ward here knows the story of that killing.
The air is filled with it. The men and women keep
trying to tell me, but they’re afraid.
The police have them scared and they half-tell me
and then run away like frightened animals.
“I want them to tell you. You don’t
count with the police down here. They think you’re
too beautiful and too good to touch the real life of
these people. None of them—the bosses
or the police—are watching you. I’ll
keep kicking up dust and you get the information I
want. You can do the job if you’re any
good.”
After McGregor’s speech the woman sat in silence
and looked at him. For the first time she had
met a man who overwhelmed her and was in no way diverted
by her beauty nor her self—possession.
A hot wave, half anger, half admiration, swept over
her.
McGregor stared at the woman and waited. “I’ve
got to have facts,” he said. “Give
me the story and the names of those who know the story
and I’ll make them tell. I have some facts
now—got them by bullying a girl and by
choking a bartender in an alley. Now I want you
in your way to put me in the way of getting more facts.
You make the women talk and tell you and then you
tell me.”
When McGregor had gone Margaret Ormsby got up from
her desk in the settlement house and walked across
the city toward her father’s office. She
was startled and frightened. In a moment and by
the speech and manner of this brutal young lawyer
she had been made to realise that she was but a child
in the hands of the forces that played about her in
the First Ward. Her self—possession
was shaken. “If they are children—these
women of the town—then I am a child, a child
swimming with them in a sea of hate and ugliness.”
A new thought came into her mind. “But
he is no child—that McGregor. He is
a child of nothing. He stands on a rock unshaken.”
She tried to become indignant because of the blunt
frankness of the man’s speech. “He
talked to me as he would have talked to a woman of
the streets,” she thought. “He was
not afraid to assume that at bottom we are alike,
just playthings in the hands of the man who dares.”
In the street she stopped and looked about. Her
body trembled and she realised that the forces about
her had become living things ready to pounce upon
her. “Anyway, I will do what I can.
I will help him. I will have to do that,”
she whispered to herself.
