The great west side of Chicago has hundreds of such streets and the
coal mining town out of which McGregor had come was more inspiring as
a place in which to live. As an unemployed young man, not much given
to chance companionships, Beaut had spent many long evenings wandering
alone on the hillsides above his home town. There was a kind of
dreadful loveliness about the place at night. The long black valley
with its dense shroud of smoke that rose and fell and formed itself
into fantastic shapes in the moonlight, the poor little houses
clinging to the hillside, the occasional cry of a woman being beaten
by a drunken husband, the glare of the coke fires and the rumble of
coal cars being pushed along the railroad tracks, all of these made a
grim and rather inspiring impression on the young man's mind so that
although he hated the mines and the miners he sometimes paused in his
night wanderings and stood with his great shoulders lifted, breathing
deeply and feeling things he had no words in him to express.
In Wycliff Place McGregor got no such reactions. Foul dust filled the
air. All day the street rumbled and roared under the wheels of trucks
and light hurrying delivery wagons. Soot from the factory chimneys was
caught up by the wind and having been mixed with powdered horse manure
from the roadway flew into the eyes and the nostrils of pedestrians.
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