“I’m going out, if you please.”
“Get back in there, if you please,” he snarled, “and stay there.”
While the officers were waiting for the wagon one of the big men went upstairs and brought down two “guests.” They were about half awake and looked as if they had been on a drunk. They sat down beside me on the settee. One of them fell into a sound sleep and the other sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands on the sides of his head. Neither of them spoke. In a few minutes the wagon arrived. The girls were all ordered to go out and get in it, which they did. Then the two men and I were ordered to do the same. The madam and one of the big men got into a hack that appeared to be waiting and drove away.
The excited little man who had caused all the trouble got into the wagon with the other big man and sat beside him.
When I was being put in the wagon I protested and tried to explain, but the detectives roughly ordered me to shut up. The “harness cop” who had been at the front door went back to his beat. I did not see anything of Mike, who had been ordered to stay at the back door.
The girls laughed and joked on the way to the station and shouted “rubberneck” at everybody that looked in at the back of the open wagon. The police station was on one corner of Market Square, one of the busiest corners in the city. Hundreds of people were there daily, selling their produce. Their time was about evenly divided between serving their customers and watching the patrol wagon spewing its loads of humanity into the city prison. It seemed to me they were all there as we were unloaded and hurried through a solid lane of them into the police station. Madam Singleton was there before us, and with her was a tall, sharp-looking man, gray and about fifty. I never found out who he was, but he looked like a lawyer.
The madam, the tall man, and the two big men, who were plain-clothes detectives, went to one side, talking earnestly for a minute or two. The rest of us just stood there and waited. One of the detectives went into an office off the big room we were in, and came out at once with a man in uniform he called “captain.” The captain was a big, red-faced, gray-haired, good-natured Irishman. “Well, what’s this all about?” he said, smiling. The detective stepped over to the small, nervous man and said to the captain:
“Captain, this man complains that one of the girls in Kate Singleton’s place took one hundred dollars, two fifty-dollar bills, from him some time last night or this morning. We went down to her place and saw the girl. She denies that she took it.
“We searched her room and couldn’t find it. The balance of them don’t know anything, so they say. He wants them all searched. We couldn’t do it there, so we pinched everybody in the house and here they are, ten of ’em, seven women and three men.”
The captain took the little man in hand. “Who are you?” The little man hesitated.