“Yes, but your hands do not correspond with your clothes.”
“I wear gloves when I work. There are a great many of us fellows who do the hardest manual labor and wear blue jeans who wear gloves at our work. There is a lot of work that will lacerate the most hardy hands.”
His answer was, “Come with me. I am going to take you down anyway.”
We were not far from the jail. He did not ring up a big team of horses, a wagon and two or three men, or an automobile, to rush me to the jail as they do in other cities, although they do this in Spokane, also. We walked, and while we walked, he assured me twice that he would take the softness out of my hands by thirty days on the rock pile. He had absolutely and completely taken the law into his own hands before we ever reached the jail. This policeman knew what could and would be done to me, simply because I was apparently poor and helpless, and if their system in Spokane was as it is in other cities, I could be so nicely used for graft.
Fathers and mothers throughout America, what if it had been your boy in Spokane that night, without money and without a home? Think of the awful result! Put him in my place—about to receive the first stigma of a jail, to be thrust for thirty days among hardened criminals, made such by this same social system, to receive wanton insults and abuse, his health probably ruined for life,—possibly murdered! A man was dying at that very time in the city of Spokane, from abuse in that same city jail. Spokane began, from the first moment of my arrest, legally to plunder me, soul and body.
As I walked, I tried to incorporate into my being, the suffering and the feelings of such a man or boy. They would not have accepted his statements as to his identity, no matter how hard he tried, as I knew they would be obliged to receive mine, and there would have begun the destruction of another American citizen.
On reaching the jail the officer stopped me in a dark entrance. Pulling out his search-light he threw it over me, at the same time feeling me all over. Why he did this I could not understand, unless he may have thought I had a bomb to drop when I reached the Captain’s office.
Intending only to make a quiet investigation of Spokane, I did not leave my credentials at my hotel but had them in an inner pocket of my vest. These included several letters recently received from prominent and well-known people of the Coast. My proof was sufficient and I was promptly released. They seemed to be surprised that I was sober, and said, “Brown, how can you associate with these men and not drink?” “That is not necessary,” I replied. “There are thousands of homeless, starving men in our nation to-day who never drink.”
While I was telling my story to the force, a reporter for the leading paper of the city came in, and that paper the next morning carried a story which stirred the town. As a result Spokane is going to have its Free Municipal Emergency Home. It is true that I found a desperate condition of things in Spokane for the man without the dime. But Spokane is no longer a country town, hid in the pine woods of Washington. She is a city—a city of stupendous natural resources, a city of a great awakening. She has begun a wonderful physical adornment and is combining with it those benevolent adornments to conserve her citizens. Spokane believes in the abolition of all influences that destroy. She is a force in the world to-day.