The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion Read Online Free PDF

military service during the war: Honor, to them, was rather a remote concept, like the elaborate burial practices of the early Egyptians, and they looked upon it with the same combination of amusement and contempt reserved for last year’s collar. When they confronted him, they were contented to accept his markers, just as they were when any of their peers lost at cards or arranged a loan to hold them over until their next allowance. Some of the items were returned, in fact, and some debts repaid. But after he was locked out of his rooms for nonpayment of rent, the reality of his financial condition barred him from both their company and their hospitality. Turned away from their doors with nothing but the clothes he stood up in, Johnny Vermillion perceived that his country was headed in a harsh new direction, to a place whose customs were dictated by money, and not by whether one’s French ancestor had sailed with Drake or fought the British at Ticonderoga.
    It was a lesson for which he’d been prepared all his life. From an early age, he had witnessed the comings and goings in his father’s house of ward leaders and building contractors, bearing satchels of cash to and from Boss McNear for favors asked and services rendered. He’d spent the summer before his mother’s death runningerrands for the Democratic Party, and had seen the unsheathed greed on the faces of elder statesmen whose pen-and-ink likenesses graced the sober columns of the
Chicago Sun
when tariffs were discussed and hospitals under construction. Money was the ammunition of the Industrial Revolution; whether it was acquired with a pistol or scooped in buckets from the public treasury seemed less to the point than getting it and spending it. He had not so much a disrespect for the rights of property as a lack of awareness that any such rights existed.
    The loss of Geneva Vermillion McNear, a creature above and apart from the soiled coinage that kept the political system tinkling like a player piano, had severed whatever connection this sensitive, good-looking, queerly observant boy had maintained with the catechism of
Peré
Argulet, the spiritual guide of his youth at St. Patrick’s. The boy was a clever thief by birth and an uncommonly skilled one by education. He’d stolen far more from his acquaintances than they ever suspected—they’d blamed carelessness and attrition—and pawned it to support a standard of living somewhat greater than his father’s subsidy had made possible. Now he was denied access.
    His female friendships, although less altered (his father, a strikingly handsome figure before the overindulgence of his middle years, had given him a straight nose and a narrow waist, his mother her fair hair and all the charms of the Parisian court), offered even smaller hope for shelter. Many were married ladies, and those in single circumstances had strict landladies and rigid curfews. He had neither the training to enter a profession nor the endurance to withstand sixteen hours of physical labor daily. The spark of dramatic ambition that had glowed briefly at school had long since guttered out. That left either vagrancy or thievery from strangers. Prison fare,he’d heard, was bad for teeth and ruinous to the complexion, and certain other rumors that had come his way concerning life inside he found not worth the candle. The wastrel’s way beckoned.
    By the winter of 1872, he was sleeping on streetcar benches and begging for coins. A successful day’s panhandling bought him a “flop” for the night on Blue Island. This was a dirtfill in a canal leading from the lake and a hotbed of malaria, saloons, brothels, and that variety of lawyer that existed mainly to give abortionists and white slavers a reason to feel superior. The island itself was in a constant state of erosion, retarded only by the addition of fresh manure swept from the streets. To take a turn there was virtually impossible