In time I reached the Commissary--the government department store
--and enrolled it from cash-desk to cold-storage; Empire hotel,
from steward to scullions, filed by me whispering autobiography;
the police station on its knoll fell like the rest. I went to
jail--and set down a large score of black men and a pair of
European whites, back from a day's sweaty labor of road building,
who lived now in unaccustomed cleanliness in the heart of the
lower story of a fresh wooden building with light iron bars, easy
to break out of were it not that policemen, white and black, sleep
on all sides of them. Crowded old Empire not only faces her
streets but even her back yards are filled with shacks and
inhabited boxes to be hunted out. On the hem of her tattered
outskirts and the jungle edges I ran into heaps of old abandoned
junk,--locomotives, cars, dredges, boilers (some with the letters
"U. S." painted upon them, which sight gave some three-day
investigator material to charge the I. C. C. with untold waste);
all now soon to be removed by a Chicago wrecking company.
Then all the town must be done again--"back calls." By this time
so wide and varied was my acquaintance in Empire that wenches
withdrew a dripping hand from their tubs to wave at me with a
sympathetic giggle, and piccaninnies ran out to meet me as I
returned in quest of one missing inmate in a house of fifty.
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