His mind would hang upon the worst possibilities; he saw Ona ill and tortured, Marija out of her place, little Stanislovas unable to get to work for the snow, the whole family turned out on the street.  God Almighty! would they actually let them lie down in the street and die?  Would there be no help even then—­would they wander about in the snow till they froze?  Jurgis had never seen any dead bodies in the streets, but he had seen people evicted and disappear, no one knew where; and though the city had a relief bureau, though there was a charity organization society in the stockyards district, in all his life there he had never heard of either of them.  They did not advertise their activities, having more calls than they could attend to without that.

—­So on until morning.  Then he had another ride in the patrol wagon, along with the drunken wife-beater and the maniac, several “plain drunks” and “saloon fighters,” a burglar, and two men who had been arrested for stealing meat from the packing houses.  Along with them he was driven into a large, white-walled room, stale-smelling and crowded.  In front, upon a raised platform behind a rail, sat a stout, florid-faced personage, with a nose broken out in purple blotches.

Our friend realized vaguely that he was about to be tried.  He wondered what for—­whether or not his victim might be dead, and if so, what they would do with him.  Hang him, perhaps, or beat him to death—­nothing would have surprised Jurgis, who knew little of the laws.  Yet he had picked up gossip enough to have it occur to him that the loud-voiced man upon the bench might be the notorious Justice Callahan, about whom the people of Packingtown spoke with bated breath.

“Pat” Callahan—­“Growler” Pat, as he had been known before he ascended the bench—­had begun life as a butcher boy and a bruiser of local reputation; he had gone into politics almost as soon as he had learned to talk, and had held two offices at once before he was old enough to vote.  If Scully was the thumb, Pat Callahan was the first finger of the unseen hand whereby the packers held down the people of the district.  No politician in Chicago ranked higher in their confidence; he had been at it a long time—­had been the business agent in the city council of old Durham, the self-made merchant, way back in the early days, when the whole city of Chicago had been up at auction.  “Growler” Pat had given up holding city offices very early in his career—­caring only for party power, and giving the rest of his time to superintending his dives and brothels.  Of late years, however, since his children were growing up, he had begun to value respectability, and had had himself made a magistrate; a position for which he was admirably fitted, because of his strong conservatism and his contempt for “foreigners.”

Jurgis sat gazing about the room for an hour or two; he was in hopes that some one of the family would come, but in this he was disappointed.  Finally, he was led before the bar, and a lawyer for the company appeared against him.  Connor was under the doctor’s care, the lawyer explained briefly, and if his Honor would hold the prisoner for a week—­“Three hundred dollars,” said his Honor, promptly.