At the approach of the carriage the black Hennery sprang up and with the gesture of one opening the gates of Buckingham Palace, shouted to the crowd outside, “Look out, you all! There’s carriages a-coming!”
Then with a great clanging and shooting of bolts he swung open the gates and Mrs. Julis Harrison and her son William swept through. The hoofs of the dancing horses beat a tattoo on the cobblestones. The mother saw nothing, but the narrow eyes of her son appraised the group of boys and even the babies as potential workers in the Mills. These Dago children grew rapidly, but not fast enough to keep pace with the needs of the growing furnaces; and so many of them died before they reached manhood.
As the carriage swung into narrow Halsted Street, Mrs. Harrison, leaning forward so that the gold chain swayed like a pendulum from her mountainous bosom, surveyed the wretched houses, the yards bereft of all green, and the shabby railway station that stood a hundred yards from the very gates of Shane’s Castle.
“You’d think Julia Shane would move out of this filthy district,” she said. “Sentiment is all right, but there’s such a thing as running it into the ground. The smoke and soot is even killing the flowers. They’re not half so fine as last year.”
Her son William shrugged his narrow, sloping shoulders.
“The ground is worth its weight in gold,” he said. “Three railroads—the only site left. She could get her own price.”
In the corner saloon a mechanical piano set up a tinny uproar and shattered fragments of The Blue Danube drifted out upon the hot air through the swinging doors into the street, throttling for the moment any further conversation.
The county auditor and his wife drove uncertainly through the gates, for the county auditor had drunk too much and failed to understand that horses driven with crossed reins do not respond according to any preconceived plan. His wife, her face red as a ripe tomato, took them from him and swore.
“She needn’t think she’s so damned swell,” she said. “What’s she got to make her so proud? I should think she’d blush at what has happened in that rotten old house. Why, she’s got nothing but Hunkies and Dagos for neighbors!”
She cut the horses across the back, dashed forward, and passed the victoria of Mrs. Harrison and her son William at a triumphant gallop.