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sadness over those remaining, candles lit and waving as they sang “Amazing Grace,” followed by “Leaning on the Everlasting” and other hymns, led in prayer and song now by Father O’Bannion and Reverend Jabes, the two religious leaders taking polite turns.
    With a hansom cab secured, Alastair and the scarecrow forcibly placed Thom into it. Alastair had to pinch his nose against the stench coming off the homeless helper. He next paid the driver in advance and shelled out the second of two bits to the seedy-looking, sad-eyed fellow who’d jumped at the chance to earn it.
    The city is full of such blokes , he thought, and dug deeper for another five cents. Overhead, a public gaslight flickered as if to go out, followed by another and another, yet the night was still, windless, the trees limp. Orders perhaps from authorities? Shut off the lights and people might disperse? The gas lamps were covered, protected from the wind, and the flow of gas controlled. When the lights flickered out for the final time, it threw the remaining mourners into darkness.
    Against all reason, this Chicago crowd began to shout that it’d been Mayor Harrison’s doing, shutting down the lights so magically, although it occurred every morning come twilight. This crowd wanted to believe that Carter Harrison’s spirit still had a hand on the controls. As if the mayor’s own spirit had blown past the lamps and over the crowd. But of course Alastair reasoned that this was but a ludicrous fantasy, like something out of a romance novel like Jane Eyre.
    He looked up at the mayor’s house, where he made out Jane’s silhouette as Dr. Tewes going about the parlor, and in a moment he saw her hugging Mrs. Harrison, whose own silhouette shivered and sobbed behind the lace curtains.
    Alastair quietly counseled himself. “Perhaps Jane can do some good in there after all.”
    Â 
    Ransom made his way to the Plaisance at the Midway in White City. On a good day, a balmy day, with wind and sun filtering through the lakefront at Jackson Park, this large open air garden for food and drink looked like a combination of an August Renoir painting and one of Mr. Edison’s new moving pictures, which had enjoyed so much attention at the fair. Renoir right down to the sailboats in the harbor, but recently the Plaisance had become more a haven for every kind of insect, vermin, lowlife, and foul bastard found in the city. All manner of underworld activities, once reserved for back alleys and places like Mother Gatz’s Parlor, Moose Muldoon’s Bar, or Mike Hinky Dink Kenna’s “back o’ the yards” saloon were being played out here, often in plain view of the fairgoers, the most outrageous being the pimps who’d dressed some local addict like Lulu Lee, Ugly French Mary, Lizzie Allen, or Lottie Maynard up as a Little Egypt or a Lillian Russell and touted “fair” prices for such tarts!
    Tonight the usually pleasant Midway had become a hotbed of new sedition and rantings. Men who felt disenfranchised, and men who were disenfranchised, got up on soapboxes and began politicizing about the “Unfair!”
    The only ones getting wealthy off the fair appeared those who least needed it. This fact had had a long-smoldering effect on many displaced small-time merchants and vendors, and their cry had been building all summer long. Others shouted about the shabby state of affairs in the city in general. Some began to sound a lot like the arsonists and the anarchists of Haymarket days. In fact, the situation and its potential for violence reminded Ransom just how perilous circumstances in his city were, regardless of the laws passed since the Haymarket Square labor riot and bombing that’d left him physically and psychologically scarred. For many Chicagoans, not a lot of change had come about, and they’d grown impatient this sultry night that had taken the mayor from their midst. When