"This is Mr. ——," he said. "I believe you called upon my sister today."
"What is that?" the woman's voice answered. "Who are you? You must be mistaken. Who do you think you are talking to?"
"Mrs. Schwartz, isn't it?"
There was a moment of hesitation. The man imagined it a moment of confusion. And then the voice answered: "Oh, no, this is Miss Gartz. You are talking to the wrong person." A mocking laugh and a click of the receiver announced to the man that he had been rung off.
He called up the Arena again. He asked for Mrs. Schwartz. He was told that there was no such person there. He asked the clerk for Miss Gartz again. The man was sorry, but Miss Gartz had just left. Repeated telephone calls for both Mrs. Schwartz and Miss Gartz were answered in succeeding days with the information that there were no such persons there. Miss Gartz was not on the hotel register. Neither was Mrs. Schwartz.
The brother of the young Chicago girl went to the offices of the Chicago Tribune and the Daily News and asked for the name of the woman who inserted the "Traveling Companion" advertisement. He was told that the papers were sorry, but that would be impossible. The clerks who had charge of the want ads were under bonds to divulge no information regarding blind advertisements. They could not tell who inserted them, anyway, as no names were taken. The letters when received by the newspapers were held until the advertisers called for them. The newspapers could not maintain the integrity of their advertising columns if they asked impertinent questions of every advertiser.
The newspaper men were sorry. No one regretted the creeping into their columns of such matter so much as they. Both papers employed detectives to scrutinize the want columns and to hunt down and expurgate such advertising if the least possible suspicion was attached to it, but many want ads were so cleverly and innocently worded that they would creep in despite every possible precaution that might be taken.
The young man employed detectives himself. He went to a large agency and told the manager the circumstances. Hardened as he was through constant association with crime and its varied phases, the manager of the agency winced when the story was finished.
"You've saved your sister from a living hell," said the crime expert. "You've saved her from the most terrible spider that ever wove a net for the accomplishment of ruin. 'Mrs. Schwartz' the widow, is a procuress—the most clever and fiendish procuress known to us. She works under a hundred aliases. So keen is she, so clever in her plots to bring about the ruin of young girls, that we can not cope with her. She is a rich woman. Every dollar that she has made represents a soul blackened, an innocent metamorphosed into a drug sotted, degraded creature of the red lights.