"All right; go back there and give your name."

So within half an hour he was at work, far underneath
the streets of the city. The tunnel was a peculiar one for
telephone-wires; it was about eight feet high, and with
a level floor nearly as wide. It had innumerable branches
-- a perfect spider web beneath the city; Jurgis walked
over half a mile with his gang to the place where they were
to work. Stranger yet, the tunnel was lighted by elec~
tricity, and upon it was laid a double-tracked, narrow-
gauge railroad!

But Jurgis was not there to ask questions, and he did
not give the matter a thought. It was nearly a year after~
ward that he finally learned the meaning of this whole
affair. The City Council had passed a quiet and innocent
little bill allowing a company to construct telephone con~
duits under the city streets; and upon the strength of this, a
great corporation had proceeded to tunnel all Chicago with
a system of railway freight-subways. In the city there
was a combination of employers, representing hundreds of
millions of capital, and formed for the purpose of crushing
the labor unions. The chief union which troubled it was
the teamsters'; and when these freight tunnels were com~
pleted, connecting all the big factories and stores with the
railroad depots, they would have the teamsters' union by
the throat. Now and then there were rumors and mur~
murs in the Board of Aldermen, and once there was a com~
mittee to investigate -- but each time another small fortune
was paid over, and the rumors died away; until at last the
city woke up with a start to find the work completed.
There was a tremendous scandal, of course; it was found
that the city records had been falsified and other crimes
committed, and some of Chicago's big capitalists got into
jail -- figuratively speaking. The aldermen declared that
they had had no idea of it all, in spite of the fact that the
main entrance to the work had been in the rear of the
saloon of one of them.

It was in a newly opened cut that Jurgis worked, and so
he knew that he had an all-winter job. He was so rejoiced
that he treated himself to a spree that night, and with the

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v?