sometimes they would have to be "doped" and kept prisoners for
weeks; and meantime their parents might be telegraphing the police, and
even coming on to see why nothing was done. Occasionally there was no
way of satisfying them but to let them search the place to which the
girl had been traced.

For his help in this little job, the bartender received twenty out of
the hundred and thirty odd dollars that the pair secured; and naturally
this put them on friendly terms with him, and a few days later he
introduced them to a little "sheeny" named Goldberger, one of the
"runners" of the "sporting house" where they had been hidden. After a
few drinks Goldberger began, with some hesitation, to narrate how he had
had a quarrel over his best girl with a professional "cardsharp," who
had hit him in the jaw. The fellow was a stranger in Chicago, and if he
was found some night with his head cracked there would be no one to care
very much. Jurgis, who by this time would cheerfully have cracked the
heads of all the gamblers in Chicago, inquired what would be coming to
him; at which the Jew became still more confidential, and said that he
had some tips on the New Orleans races, which he got direct from the
police captain of the district, whom he had got out of a bad scrape, and
who "stood in" with a big syndicate of horse owners. Duane took all
this in at once, but Jurgis had to have the whole race-track situation
explained to him before he realized the importance of such an
opportunity.

There was the gigantic Racing Trust. It owned the legislatures in
every state in which it did business; it even owned some of the big
newspapers, and made public opinion--there was no power in the land that
could oppose it unless, perhaps, it were the Poolroom Trust. It built
magnificent racing parks all over the country, and by means of enormous
purses it lured the people to come, and then it organized a gigantic
shell game, whereby it plundered them of hundreds of millions of dollars
every year. Horse racing had once been a sport, but nowadays it was
a business; a horse could be "doped" and doctored, undertrained or
overtrained; it could be made to fall at any moment--or its gait could
be broken by lashing it with the whip, which all the spectators would
take to be a desperate effort to keep it in the lead. There were scores
of such tricks; and sometimes it was the owners who played them and made
fortunes, sometimes it was the jockeys and trainers