Booth Tarkington

“ You saw the soot falling back upon the people who made it, fouling and suffocating them, making them cough; making more hideous the great nondescript buildings where they did their business, streaking and smudging the wide confusion of shoddy houses where they ate and slept and kept the begrimed women and children. Through the dim and dirty air you made out the fringes of the town, the shacks standing in little yards, or mudholes, where chickens and pigs groped in the factory smoke. ”

“ Enthusiast that he was, he had determined to be the discoverer of the immortal word or phrase—that perfect second name for Vreedersburgh, which would indeed, as another orator had prophesied, “send the grand old city of Vreedersburgh crashing down the ages with her head up and her tail over the dashboard!”
Harley Otis believed that the right word, if discovered, might easily double the population within ten years. Glory would rest forever upon the man who discovered it, and thus glorified his city. Harley was the mayor, and the city was peculiarly his to glorify ”

“ Burning soft coal, it smeared itself over the landscape as a soot-spot smears itself over a clean face. The forest was gone; and the sky was gone; the creek was gone; sliming through tunnels and under culverts, it had become a sewer. And where the pleasant murmurs had stirred the under side of leaves, steam-whistles screamed, drays thundered, and draymen cursed. Still the big soot-spot spread, its rough circumference inexorably creeping upon the farms ”

“ Such a thing was far from unlikely—especially if he found the second name for Vreedersburgh.
Still concentrating fiercely upon his problem, he came to the fringe of the town; and here he rode between slattern tenements where children coughed in the smoke-fog, and murky women, waving gray dish-towels, urged them schoolward. Farther on, the mare was fetlock deep in mud; pavements of pitted asphalt and worn brick gave way to sloughs, houses and tenements to rough shacks and to shelters built of tin and stolen canvas, where apathetic faces stared from windows never glazed. ”

“ These hustling souls were boisterously content with their own way of life, and they loved their money-making city. When Harley Otis was elected mayor the name Vreedersburgh meant more than a hundred thousand people, their ideals, and all their works.
Harley Otis was young, but he had already proved himself to be a devoted Vreedersburgher, and it was to his reputation as a patriot that he owed his election. Two breweries always fought each other for the “mayorality.” ”

“ We'll show 'em that all our girls got homes they live in, and live with their own families, and only work in the cannery to make something on the side, kind of—to help out at home, or maybe just to have their own pocket money, for pitcher shows and so on.' That's the way they figured it out when they saw the investigation was goin' to get around to them. About half the girls did live at home with their families anyway, so the factory just discharged the rest of us—the ones that didn't have no homes—and filled up our places with new hands that did. ”

“ That's why I had to leave Boonville, you mayor, you!”
“All right,” he said. “That all you wanted to tell me?”
“You know better,” she contented herself with retorting quietly; and went on: “I come up to Vreedersburgh, and got a job in Baker's canning factory, six dollars and a half a week. Well, this Mabel Dessing was the girl that worked next to me, and her and I got on right good; so after while we hired a room together. We put our wages together, too, and that made thirteen a week; it goes farther that way than what six and a half does for one. We got along first-rate.” ”

“ She told me how it was: the prosecutor gets fees for all the prosecutions by him and his deputies, she says; but if the cops don't raid around some and arrest a lot o' people the prosecutor don't make much, so of course the prosecutor has to do the right thing by the cops. Well, the people that don't want to get arrested, they do the right thing by the cops, too; and sometimes the cops do one way a while, and then they turn round and do the other. Well, Mabel was in bad trouble, because, she says, the cops and the prosecutor had got friendly again ”

“ We'll say we're brother an' sister, an' we'll work all day, an' in the evenings I'll fiddle in the kitchen. Will you, Milly?”
She looked at him thoughtfully and then smiled. “Why, yes, I guess so,” she said. “I don't see why not.”
But the Mayor of Vreedersburgh interposed. “Nonsense!” he exclaimed. “You'll have a harder time finding work in the country than you did in town. This boy wouldn't be the worse for a few months in the reform school; they're very conscientious people in charge there ”

“ But Harley Otis was made mayor by neither of the breweries: he was nominated and elected by the banks.
The bankers were tired of the kind of men the breweries elected, so they made the breweries and the politicians understand that it was about time for a business administration, and they forced the nomination and election of Harley Otis. The breweries and their dependents acquiesced without bitterness. Of course there would have to be a little persecution here and there to satisfy the better element and boost the prosecutor's fees ”

“ Harley said, nodding. “They couldn't do much else, under the circumstances. They're bound to the stockholders to be economical, of course.”
“Oh, I'm not blamin' anybody for that,” said Milly Cross. “Everybody's got to lose their job now and then. I and Mabel had some money to go on; we'd saved twenty-six dollars, and there was even five of it left when we got arrested, night before last. By that time I knew about Mabel as well as you seemed to when you had us up before you. I found out two, three months before we got discharged from the cannery. ”

“ It was because in all that time I'd been livin' in Vreedersburgh I'd never had one pretty thing to look at, and never once been clean!”
“What!” cried the astounded and indignant mayor. “What do you mean?”
“Why, you know it yourself, Mr. Otis,” said Milly, “if you stop to think. Just the minute a person's washed in that town he's dirty again! That was what had been poisonin' me—never seein' a thing that wasn't ugly and never bein' clean! If a person could be clean for a little while maybe they could stand it, and if they could see something pretty maybe they could ”

“ The fair lands were fertile; a nucleus of tavern and farmers' warehouse developed among the scattered cabins; the cabins became farmhouses, and, in place of the rough nucleus, a little market-town with a church, a doctor, and four saloons appeared. ”

“ Seems the church people, or somebody like that, had went and got up a big investigation about bad girls that work in stores and factories, and they were givin' a hard name to any place that paid girls less than eight dollars a week. Well, our factory didn't want to get a hard name, so the bosses worked things out like this: they says, 'When them committees come around here investigatin' we want to show 'em that the girls that work for us don't haf to do nothin' bad to make a livin' outside of the six and a half they get from the cannery. ”

“ People in saloons are apt to be mighty good-hearted. I expeck I made as much as sellin' papers. Anyways, I shore seen some good fights!”
The mayor flushed slightly. “You may need a month or two at the reform school,” he said.
A PAGAN FIGURINE, SKETCHED IN IVORY AGAINST A TAPESTRY OF UNDERBRUSH.
“Yes, sir,” Ben returned meekly. “I thought they might git me; they already got four o' the crowd I run with. That's why I quit the ole smoke-stack.”
“What are you talking about?” Harley asked impatiently.
“Vreedersburgh,” said Ben. “I says to myself, 'What's the use stayin' here?' I says. ”

“ She says the cops would do all the arrestin' at first just around among girls like her that was all alone, because the other people had more influence and paid regular. And she says she was liable to get in pretty bad with the cops, because she'd been havin' some beer with a fella, a couple days before, at Wechsel's and he got pretty drunk and went home, and she found a ten-dollar bill on the chair where he'd been sittin', an' kep' it. ”