Page:Slabs of the sunburnt West.djvu/19

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The Windy City
5
It is easy to sit listening to a boy babbling of the Pottawattamie moccasins in Illinois, how now the roofs and smokestacks cover miles where the deerfoot left its writing and the foxpaw put its initials in the snow … for the early moccasins … to read.
It is easy for the respectable taxpayers to sit in the street cars and read the papers, faces of burglars, the prison escapes, the hunger strikes, the cost of living, the price of dying, the shop gate battles of strikers and strikebreakers, the strikers killing scabs and the police killing strikers—the strongest, the strongest, always the strongest.
It is easy to listen to the haberdasher customers hand each other their easy chatter—it is easy to die alive—to register a living thumbprint and be dead from the neck up.And there are sidewalks polished with the footfalls of undertakers' stiffs, greased mannikins, wearing up-to-the-minute sox, lifting heels across doorsills, shoving their faces ahead of them—dead from the neck up—proud of their sox—their sox are the last word—dead from the neck up—it is easy.
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