Gambling dens had grown here like mushrooms during the past year of war's fevered life. The vice and crime of the whole North and West had poured into Washington, now swarming with a quarter of a million strange people.
The Capital was no longer a city of sixty thousand inhabitants, but a vast frontier post and pay station of the army. And such a pay station! Each day the expenditures of the Government were more than two millions. The air was electric with the mad lust for gain which the scent of millions excites in the nostrils of the wolves who prey on their fellow men. The streets swarmed with these hungry beasts, male and female. They pushed and crowded and jostled each other from the sidewalks. The roar of their whiskey-laden voices poured forth from every bar-room and gambling den on the Avenue.
A fat contractor who had made his pile in pasteboard soles for army shoes and sent more boys to the grave from disease than had been killed in battle, touched elbows with the hook-nosed vulture who was sporting a diamond pin bought with the profits of shoddy clothes that had proven a shroud for many a brave soldier sleeping in a premature grave.
They were laughing, drinking, smoking, swearing, gambling and all shouting for the flag—the flag that was waving over millions they hoped yet to share.
A feeling of sickening fear swept the girl's heart. For the first time in her life she was afraid to be alone on the brightly lighted streets of Washington at dusk. The poison of death was in the air. Every desperate passion that stirs the brute in man was written in the bloodshot eyes that sought hers. The Nation was at war. To cheat, deceive, entrap, maim, kill the enemy and lay his home in desolation was the daily business now of the millions who backed the Government. Whatever the lofty aims of either of the contending hosts, they sought to win by war and this was war. It was not to be wondered at that this spirit should begin to poison the springs of life in the minds of the weak and send them forth to prey on their fellows. It was not to be wondered at that men planned in secret to advance their own interests at the expense of their fellows, to climb the ladder of wealth and fame in this black hour no matter on whose dead bodies they had to walk.
With a pang of positive terror Betty asked herself the question whether the man she loved had been touched by this deadly pestilence? A wave of horror swept her. A drunken brute brushed by and thrust his bloated face into hers.
With a cry of rage and fear she turned and ran for two blocks, left the Avenue at the corner and hurried back to her home.
She would wait until morning and see the President before the crowd arrived.
He greeted her with a joyous shout:
"Come right in, Miss Betty!"