I did not stay to see the inauguration. Somehow Washington had lost its brightness, and the grand men and beautiful women their interest. I had read almost every week for a number of years of “T. R.,” and of his democratic way of walking on Sunday morning to church, and then I fell to wondering why he never walked to a few other places in Washington, which were only a stone’s throw from his home. But one with great cares cannot be blamed for thoughtlessness in “little things.” I did not go to church as I intended. I spent the morning asking the press to appeal to the city of Washington, where Lincoln and Washington lived, thought, and acted, the city of love, charity and freedom, not to let another day pass until they had started a movement and sent a delegation to inspect and to copy the Municipal Lodging House of New York, that they, too, might build one, to be the example of our country.
CHAPTER VI
The Little Pittsburg of the West and Its Great Wrong
“Even the night shall be light about me.”—Psalms 139:11.
In Pueblo, Colorado, I discovered they were finding men dead in an ash-dump of a railroad company. Pueblo, called “The Little Pittsburg of the West,” is distinctly an industrial city. It naturally attracts thousands of workingmen during the course of the year, and when the demand for labor is supplied, it follows that many men will congregate there, willing to work but often unable to find employment immediately.
The great ash-dump, about a fourth of a mile in length, afforded warmth to the destitute homeless man, who had his choice between this exigency and the city jail. Men would lie down on the warm cinders, and while they slumbered, the poisonous gases would asphyxiate them. The death of their brother workers had made men cautious and when I was there they no longer crawled out upon the ashes, but lay down on the edge of the dump, where the ground held a certain degree of warmth.
I joined the miserable group one night, and as I lay there, and the night grew cold and dark and still, I could see, like serpents, the tongues of blue poisonous fumes leap from crack and cranny. I stood the exposure to the limits of endurance, and then crept away to that other humane expression of Pueblo—its only “Municipal Emergency Home,” the “Bull-pen” in its old bastile.
It was midnight as I entered, and a man hearing me in the hall came out of an office and looked at me inquiringly. Finally he asked:
“What do you want?”