Gambling dens had grown here like mushrooms during the past year of
war's fevered life. The vice and crime of the whole North and West had
poured into Washington, now swarming with a quarter of a million strange
people.
The Capital was no longer a city of sixty thousand inhabitants, but a
vast frontier post and pay station of the army. And such a pay station!
Each day the expenditures of the Government were more than two millions.
The air was electric with the mad lust for gain which the scent of
millions excites in the nostrils of the wolves who prey on their fellow
men. The streets swarmed with these hungry beasts, male and female. They
pushed and crowded and jostled each other from the sidewalks. The roar
of their whiskey-laden voices poured forth from every bar-room and
gambling den on the Avenue.
A fat contractor who had made his pile in pasteboard soles for army
shoes and sent more boys to the grave from disease than had been killed
in battle, touched elbows with the hook-nosed vulture who was sporting a
diamond pin bought with the profits of shoddy clothes that had proven a
shroud for many a brave soldier sleeping in a premature grave.
They were laughing, drinking, smoking, swearing, gambling and all
shouting for the flag--the flag that was waving over millions they hoped
yet to share.
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