nally pieced together enough of a story to make it
exceedingly unpleasant for the Honorable Chaffee in case he were to
become the too willing tool of Cowperwood's enemies. The principal
agent in this affair was a certain Claudia Carlstadt--adventuress,
detective by disposition, and a sort of smiling prostitute and
hireling, who was at the same time a highly presentable and experienced
individual. Needless to say, Cowperwood knew nothing of these minor
proceedings, though a genial nod from him in the beginning had set in
motion the whole machinery of trespass in this respect.

Claudia Carlstadt--the instrument of the Honorable Chaffee's
undoing--was blonde, slender, notably fresh as yet, being only
twenty-six, and as ruthless and unconsciously cruel as only the
avaricious and unthinking type--unthinking in the larger philosophic
meaning of the word--can be. To grasp the reason for her being, one
would have had to see the spiritless South Halstead Street world from
which she had sprung--one of those neighborhoods of old, cracked, and
battered houses where slatterns trudge to and fro with beer-cans and
shutters swing on broken hinges. In her youth Claudia had been made to
"rush the growler," to sell newspapers at the corner of Halstead and
Harrison streets, and to buy cocaine at the nearest drug store. Her
little dresses and underclothing had always been of the poorest and
shabbiest material--torn and dirty, her ragged stockings frequently
showed the white flesh of her thin little legs, and her shoes were worn
and cracked, letting the water and snow seep through in winter. Her
companions were wretched little street boys of her own neighborhood,
from whom she learned to swear and to understand and indulge in vile
practices, though, as is often the case with children, she was not
utterly depraved thereby, at that. At eleven, when her mother died,
she ran away from the wretched children's home to which she had been
committed, and by putting up a piteous tale she was harbored on the
West Side by an Irish family whose two daughters were clerks in a large
retail store. Through these Claudia became a cash-girl. Thereafter
followed an individual career as strange and checkered as anything that
had gone before. Sufficient to say that Claudia's native intelligence
was considerable. At the age of twenty she had managed--through her
connections with the son of a shoe manufacturer and with a rich
jeweler--to amass a little cas