A smile played about the corners of his mouth. He opened and
closed his fist reflectively. Then taking a law book from a shelf
below the counter he began reading again, moving his lips and resting
his head upon his hands.
McGregor's law office was upstairs over a secondhand clothing store in
Van Buren Street. There he sat at his desk reading and waiting and at
night he returned to the State Street restaurant. Now and then he went
to the Harrison Street police station to hear a police court trial and
through the influence of O'Toole was occasionally given a case that
netted him a few dollars. He tried to think that the years spent in
Chicago were years of training. In his own mind he knew what he wanted
to do but did not know how to begin. Instinctively he waited. He saw
the march and countermarch of events in the lives of the people
tramping on the sidewalks below his office window, saw in his mind the
miners of the Pennsylvania village coming down from the hills to
disappear below the ground, looked at the girls hurrying through the
swinging doors of department stores in the early morning, wondering
which of them would presently sit idling with toothpicks in O'Toole's
and waited for the word or the stir on the surface of that sea of
humanity that would be a sign to him.
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