The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (easy to read books for adults list TXT) 📕

he had had a quarrel over his best girl with a professional “cardsharp,” who had hit him in the jaw. The fellow was a stranger in Chicago, and if he was found some night with his head cracked there would be no one to care very much. Jurgis, who by this time would cheerfully have cracked the heads of all the gamblers in Chicago, inquired what would be coming to him; at which the Jew became still more confidential, and said that he had some tips on the New Orleans races, which he got direct from the police captain of the district, whom he had got out of a bad scrape, and who “stood in” with a big syndicate of horse owners. Duane took all this in at once, but Jurgis had to have the whole racetrack situation explained to him before he realized the importance of such an opportunity.

There was the gigantic Racing Trust. It owned the legislatures in every state in which it did business; it even owned some of the big newspapers, and made public opinion⁠—there was no power in the land that could oppose it unless, perhaps, it were the Poolroom Trust. It built magnificent racing parks all over the country, and by means of enormous purses it lured the people to come, and then it organized a gigantic shell-game, whereby it plundered them of hundreds of millions of dollars every year. Horseracing had once been a sport, but nowadays it was a business; a horse could be “doped” and doctored, undertrained or overtrained; it could be made to fall at any moment⁠—or its gait could be broken by lashing it with the whip, which all the spectators would take to be a desperate effort to keep it in the lead. There were scores of such tricks; and sometimes it was the owners who played them and made fortunes, sometimes it was the jockeys and trainers, sometimes it was outsiders, who bribed them⁠—but most of the time it was the chiefs of the trust. Now, for instance, they were having winter-racing in New Orleans, and a syndicate was laying out each day’s programme in advance, and its agents in all the Northern cities were “milking” the poolrooms. The word came by long-distance telephone in a cipher code, just a little while before each race; and any man who could get the secret had as good as a fortune. If Jurgis did not believe it, he could try it, said the little Jew⁠—let them meet at a certain house on the morrow and make a test. Jurgis was willing, and so was Duane, and so they went to one of the high-class poolrooms where brokers and merchants gambled (with society women in a private room), and they put up ten dollars each upon a horse called “Black Beldame,” a six to one shot, and won. For a secret like that they would have done a good many sluggings⁠—but the next day Goldberger informed them that the offending gambler had got wind of what was coming to him, and had skipped the town.

There were ups and downs at the business; but there was always a living, inside of a jail, if not out of it. Early in April the city elections were due, and that meant prosperity for all the powers of graft. Jurgis, hanging round in dives and gambling-houses and brothels, met with the heelers of both parties, and from their conversation he came to understand all the ins and outs of the game, and to hear of a number of ways in which he could make himself useful about election time. “Buck” Halloran was a “Democrat,” and so Jurgis became a Democrat also; but he was not a bitter one⁠—the Republicans were good fellows, too, and were to have a pile of money in this next campaign. At the last election the Republicans had paid four dollars a vote to the Democrats’ three; and “Buck” Halloran sat one night playing cards with Jurgis and another man, who told how Halloran had been charged with the job of voting a “bunch” of thirty-seven newly landed Italians, and how he, the narrator, had met the Republican worker who was after the very same gang, and how the three had effected a bargain, whereby the Italians were to vote half and half, for a glass of beer apiece, while the balance of the fund went to the conspirators!

Not long after this, Jurgis, wearying of the risks and vicissitudes of miscellaneous crime, was moved to give up the career for that of a politician. Just at this time there was a tremendous uproar being raised concerning the alliance between the criminals and the police. For the criminal graft was one in which the business men had no direct part⁠—it was what is called a “sideline,” carried by the police. “Wide-open” gambling and debauchery made the city pleasing to “trade,” but burglaries and holdups did not. One night it chanced that while Jack Duane was drilling a safe in a clothing store he was caught red-handed by the nightwatchman, and turned over to a policeman, who chanced to know him well, and who took the responsibility of letting him make his escape. Such a howl from the newspapers followed this that Duane was slated for a sacrifice, and barely got out of town in time.

And just at that juncture it happened that Jurgis was introduced to a man named Harper whom he recognized as the nightwatchman at Brown’s, who had been instrumental in making him an American citizen, the first year of his arrival at the yards. The other was interested in the coincidence, but did not remember Jurgis⁠—he had handled too many “green ones” in his time, he said. He sat in a dance-hall with Jurgis and Halloran until one or two in the morning, exchanging experiences. He had a long story to tell of his quarrel with the superintendent of his department, and how he was now a plain