“Well, I was a Traction sucker, all right, and I guess you wouldn’t have to walk more than two blocks to find another in this neighbourhood.  You think Eldon Parr’s a big, noble man, don’t you?  You’re proud to run his church, ain’t you?  You wouldn’t believe there was a time when I thought he was a big man, when I was kind of proud to live in the same city with him.  She’ll tell you how I used to come home from the store and talk about him after supper, and hope that the kid there would grow up into a financier like Eldon Parr.  The boys at the store talked about him:  he sort of laid hold on our imaginations with the library he gave, and Elmwood Park, and the picture of the big organ in your church in the newspapers—­and sometimes, Mary and me and the boy, in the baby carriage, on Sunday afternoons we used to walk around by his house, just to look at it.  You couldn’t have got me to believe that Eldon Parr would put his name to anything that wasn’t straight.

“Then Consolidated Tractions came along, with Parr’s, name behind it.  Everybody was talking about it, and how it was payin’ eight per cent. from the start, and extra dividends and all, and what a marvel of finance it was.  Before the kid came, as soon as I married her, we began to save up for him.  We didn’t go to the theatres or nothing.  Well, I put it all, five thousand dollars, into Consolidated.  She’ll tell you how we sat up half the night after we got the first dividend talking about how we’d send the kid to college, and after we went to bed we couldn’t sleep.  It wasn’t more than a year after that we began to hear things—­and we couldn’t sleep for sure, and the dividends stopped and the stock tumbled.  Even then I wouldn’t believe it of him, that he’d take poor people’s money that way when he had more than he knew what to do with.  I made up my mind if I went down to see him and told him about it, he’d make it right.  I asked the boss for an hour off, and headed for the Parr building—­I’ve been there as much as fifty times since—­but he don’t bother with small fry.  The clerks laugh when they see me comin’ . . .  I got sick worryin’, and when I was strong enough to be around they’d filled my job at the grocery, and it wasn’t long before we had to move out of our little home in Alder Street.  We’ve been movin’ ever since,” he cried, and tears of weakness were in his eyes, “until we’ve come to this, and we’ll have to get out of here in another week.  God knows where we’ll go then.”

Hodder shuddered.

“Then I found out how he done it—­from a lawyer.  The lawyer laughed at me, too.  Say, do you wonder I ain’t got much use for your church people?  Parr got a corporation lawyer named Langmaid—­he’s another one of your millionnaire crooks—­to fix it up and get around the law and keep him out of jail.  And then they had to settle with Tim Beatty for something like three hundred thousand.  You know who Beatty is—­he owns this city—­his saloon’s around here on Elm Street.  All the crooks had