The party with me were astonished and wondered how such things as they saw could exist in a city like New York. There were all classes in the place, sailors, men, women, and girls, who had lost all self-respect and thought of nothing but the drink and the dance.
While sitting there the lady's attention was drawn to a girl at the next table who sat there looking at the lady, with the tears streaming down her cheeks. The lady said, "Mr. Ranney, what is the matter with that girl? Ask her to join us." I got another chair and asked the girl to come over and sit beside the lady, who asked her how she came to be there, and why she was crying.
At that the girl began to cry harder and sobbed as though her heart would break. After she became a little more quiet she said, "You look like my mother, and I'll never see her again! Oh, I wish I was dead!" We asked her why she didn't go home to her mother. She cried out, "I can't! They won't let me! And if I could get away how could I get to Cincinnati, Ohio, where my mother lives?"
We got her story from the girl, and this is how it ran: She got into conversation with a well-dressed woman in Cincinnati one day who said that she could get her a position as stenographer and typewriter at a fine salary. After telling her mother about it, she and the woman started for New York, the woman paying the fare. The woman gave her an address of a party, but when the poor girl got there, there was no job for a typewriter; it was a very different position. The young girl had been lured from home on false promises, and here she was a "white slave" through no fault of her own.
A difficult situation confronted us. The girl was in trouble and needed help, and what were we going to do about it? She was as pretty a girl as I ever saw, with large black eyes, a regular Southern type of beauty, and just beginning the downward career. That means, as the girls on the Bowery put it, first the Tenderloin, then the white lights and lots of so-called pleasure, until her beauty begins to fade, which usually takes about a year. Second, Fourteenth Street, a little lower down the grade. Third, the Bowery, still lower, where they get nothing but blows and kicks. The fourth and last step, some joint like this, the back room of a saloon, down and out, all respect gone, nothing to live for; some mother's girl picked up some morning frozen stiff; the patrol, the morgue, and then Potter's Field. Some mother away in a country town is waiting for her girl who never comes back.
God help the mothers who read this, for it's true. Look to your girls and don't trust the first strange woman who comes into your house, for she may be a wolf in sheep's clothing. She wants your daughter's fresh young beauty, that's her trade, and the Devil pays good and plenty.
I asked the girl whether she had any friends near, and she said she had an aunt living on Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, that she thought might take her. Then looking around the room she said, "But he won't let me go anyhow." I followed her look, and there standing with his back to the wall was a man I knew. Here was this young girl made to slave and earn a living for this cur! There's lots of it done in New York—well-dressed men doing no work, living on the earnings of young girls.
We got the address of the aunt in Philadelphia, and I went out and sent a message over the wire, asking if she would receive Annie if she came to Philadelphia. I received an answer in forty-two minutes saying, "Yes, send her on. I'll meet her at the station."
I hurried back, thanking God for the answer, and found them sitting at the same table. Annie was looking better than when we first met her. I said, "It's all right; her aunt will take care of her; now all we have to do is to get her to the ferry and buy her ticket."
There was a tap on my shoulder, and looking around I saw the man she had pointed out, and he said, "You want to keep your hands off that girl, Dan, or there's going to be trouble." Now I knew this kind of man; I knew he would do me if he got a chance, and he was a big fellow at that; but I thought I could hold my own with him or any of his class. I didn't mind what he said; all I was thinking about was getting the girl to Cortlandt Street Ferry.