other work, and stuck at it,
and at last there had been a strike for shorter hours, and Harry Adams
had attempted to address a street meeting, which was the end of him.
In the states of the far South the labor of convicts is leased to
contractors, and when there are not convicts enough they have to be
supplied. Harry Adams was sent up by a judge who was a cousin of the
mill owner with whose business he had interfered; and though the life
had nearly killed him, he had been wise enough not to murmur, and at
the end of his term he and his family had left the state of South
Carolina--hell's back yard, as he called it. He had no money for
carfare, but it was harvest-time, and they walked one day and worked
the next; and so Adams got at last to Chicago, and joined the Socialist
party. He was a studious man, reserved, and nothing of an orator; but
he always had a pile of books under his desk in the hotel, and articles
from his pen were beginning to attract attention in the party press.

Contrary to what one would have expected, all this radicalism did not
hurt the hotel business; the radicals flocked to it, and the commercial
travelers all found it diverting. Of late, also, the hotel had become a
favorite stopping place for Western cattlemen. Now that the Beef Trust
had adopted the trick of raising prices to induce enormous shipments of
cattle, and then dropping them again and scooping in all they needed,
a stock raiser was very apt to find himself in Chicago without money
enough to pay his freight bill; and so he had to go to a cheap hotel,
and it was no drawback to him if there was an agitator talking in the
lobby. These Western fellows were just "meat" for Tommy Hinds--he
would get a dozen of them around him and paint little pictures of "the
System." Of course, it was not a week before he had heard Jurgis's
story, and after that he would not have let his new porter go for the
world. "See here," he would say, in the middle of an argument, "I've got
a fellow right here in my place who's worked there and seen every bit of
it!" And then Jurgis would drop his work, whatever it was, and come, and
the other would say, "Comrade Jurgis, just tell these gentlemen what you
saw on the killing-beds." At first this request caused poor Jurgis the
most acute agony, and it was like pulling teeth to get him to talk; but
gradually he found out what was wanted, and in the end he learned to
stand up and speak his piece with enthusiasm. His emplo