“Hell with Chi! I run ’em here.” He nodded at a restaurant door and asked: “Drink?”
“Only when I can get it.”
We went through the restaurant, up a flight of steps, and into a narrow second-story room with a long bar and a row of tables. Bill Quint nodded and said, “Hullo!” to some of the boys and girls at tables and bar, and steered me into one of the green-curtained booths that lined the wall opposite the bar.
We spent the next two hours drinking whiskey and talking.
The gray man didn’t think I had any right to the card I had showed him, nor to the other one I had mentioned. He didn’t think I was a good wobbly. As chief muckademuck of the I.W.W. in Personville, he considered it his duty to get the low-down on me, and to not let himself be pumped about radical affairs while he was doing it.
That was all right with me. I was interested in Personville affairs. He didn’t mind discussing them between casual pokings into my business with the red cards.
What I got out of him amounted to this:
For forty years old Elihu Willsson—father of the man who had been killed this night—had owned Personville, heart, soul, skin and guts. He was president and majority stockholder of the Personville Mining Corporation, ditto of the First National Bank, owner of the Morning Herald and Evening Herald , the city’s only newspapers, and at least part owner of nearly every other enterprise of any importance. Along with these pieces of property he owned a United States senator, a couple of representatives, the governor, the mayor, and most of the state legislature. Elihu Willsson was Personville, and he was almost the whole state.