Chicago's Soul Market.

"O, he keeps a bunch of 'fillies' in a shanty down near the corner of
Monroe and Peoria streets, and they're not foreigners, either. They're
American girls. No wonder he can make a bet like that on a mere chance
from a roll of yellow backs."

The speaker was the madam of a Peoria street resort, the listeners, a
motley crowd of women gathered in the rear of a popular saloon and
gambling house not far from the corner of Green and Madison streets, on
the seething, congested West Side of Chicago. These women had assembled in
that screened back room to risk their hard earned or evil-gotten money on
the horses of the Louisville race track.

There sat a little 18-year old, brown-eyed milliner, her dissipated face
hollow and drawn from worry and lack of sleep and an insufficient quantity
of nourishing food, while near her a white-haired old lady in shabby black
was tightly grasping two quarters, her entire worldly possession. Just
across sat a well-dressed woman restaurant keeper, a young eastern star
and half a hundred others, above all of whom shone the yellow haired madam
of the Peoria Street resort, the star patron of that great gambling room
for women, each one of whom was eagerly beckoning the well-groomed
book-maker, feverishly anxious to get her pittance on the race-track
favorite, when a connecting door was pushed suddenly open and in rushed a
fashionably dressed, brutal-faced young Russian Jew, holding loosely an
immense roll of money. Tens, twenties, hundreds--he counted them until
three hundred dollars had been placed to win upon a "clocker tip" in that
day's last race in Louisville.

There was grim, deadly silence--eating, unbearable silence in that
gambling room as they waited the ring of the telephone and the name of the
winner. Again the yellow haired madam's voice screamed shrilly out, for
she was indeed ill at ease, her money was all on the favorite--"Yes, a
bunch of American 'fillies' peddled out at 50 cents an hour to all comers,
black or white, sick or sound. No wonder he can make a play like that on
an outside chance."

Three-hundred dollars! My heart stood still almost. The thought flashed
through my brain that that wager meant hundreds of hours of shame and
slavery and horror to those girls in the shanties down on Peoria street,
some mother's girl, every one of them. I sat still for a little while and
watched the feverish anxious throng about me. My heart kept going faster