These boys, one a tradesman and the other out of work, had no home, no money, were obliged to beg, and were sleeping under the most horrible conditions. I think that if the search light could be thrown on every man destitute of a home, and into the places he is forced by circumstances to seek rest in Seattle, the humanitarians and the people of that city who really care would walk their streets and know no peace until a remedy had been found.
As I looked up the street I saw a large stone building and asked a citizen where the city jail was. He pointed to the great stone building and said, “That is the City Hall. On the top floor is the City Jail.” I remarked, “That is wonderful. That is the first jail I have ever found located as that one seems to be. It must be very bright and light and sanitary, compared to most of the prisons, which are under or almost under the ground.”
“Yes,” he replied, “it is, but it makes me shudder when I think of the awful den we had for years before that was built.”
I then strolled up and paid a visit of inspection to the jail. Reluctantly I was given an order by the police captain, directing the turnkey to grant me the privilege of looking about. The place impressed me with its cleanliness, its light and its good ventilation. He showed me first its bull-pen, one huge cell of concrete and steel, absolutely bare, where the inmates could only stand, lie down, or sit down on its concrete floor, and I remarked, “You must have as many as twenty-five in there at a time.”
“Yes, seventy-five,” he replied, and I saw again before me the vision (though it was midday), of the midnight scene of that midnight hell. Then I asked, “Where is the lodgers’ cell?”
He looked at me a little quizzically for a moment, and then showed me another cell about half as large as the bull-pen. “This is it,” he said.
It contained, as I remember, six young men or boys, I judged in their teens, and at that time of day I could not understand why they should be locked in there if they were only lodgers. So I said, “Lodgers are often forced into the bull-pen, too, are they not?” and he said, “Yes.” This lodgers’ cell, as he called it, was also absolutely bare, a stone floor the only rest for the man who must work or look for work on the morrow. But there was the Associated Charities, and if the three hundred shelterless in Seattle could have found it between nine and five o’clock, they would have been given a bed no doubt. At least a bed was offered me there.
Then my turnkey tapped slightly on a solid steel door of a solid steel cell. The only possible means for the ingress and egress of air to this dungeon was a small opening about half as large as an envelope. If I am not mistaken there was a slide door on that opening which could be closed, too, a device which is on all other similar torture chambers I have seen. He lightly tapped on the door, in a subdued way, with an expression as though he ought not to speak but must, and with an assumed, non-consequential smile, he said scarcely above a whisper, “There is a man in there.”
“What is he in there for?” I asked.
“They are trying to make him tell something they think he knows.”