But this was not the end of the story. The station captain had been influenced by her attractiveness and, since the wallet had not actually been discovered on her, wanted to let her off. He made a compromise. “I’m going to give you a ticket to Montreal. You either go to jail or take it and get out.”
She accepted the ticket, but left the train at a near-by point and rejoined her friends at another fair. There, wearing a different costume, she continued her trade. Although to look at her ingenuous face I could hardly believe it, pitting her wits against the police was to her a type of game.
Gertrude had been equally clever. She was of German origin, very stylish, moving in good circles when not in prison. She had learned that the officers of the submarine, Deutschland, which had just crossed the ocean, were to be entertained at a party. Having secured an invitation, she devoted herself to a lieutenant who, she had discovered, was carrying seven hundred dollars in his pocket. When the gathering broke up she took him back to his hotel in her car, suggesting they stop at a night club en route. There she put a drug in his glass. It took a bit of time to work, but after they had started on again he fell asleep. She gave five dollars to the doorman to take him to his room, saying he had drunk a bit too much, and then went home.
At seven the following morning, while Gertrude and her little girl were still in bed, the police raided her apartment. They could unearth nothing except what she could honestly account for. Her effects were turned upside down, and still no money was to be found.
“Then how could they send you to jail?” I queried. “You didn’t take it, did you?”
“Of course I did,” she asserted, looking at me as if I were dull-witted. “They couldn’t pin it on me, that’s all.”
Even though Gertrude had been brighter than the police, she, like many of the others, had been convicted on her past record and the present suspicious circumstances.
Josephine was another case in point. After I myself had been released I had her paroled under her own recognizance and secured a place for her as chambermaid in a hotel. Fate so arranged that in the very first room she entered on her first morning’s work she was confronted with the corpse of a man who had died in his bed during the night. She rushed out immediately, got drunk, and went directly back to jail again.
The resentment thus engendered in these caged women was like a strong, glowing flame, of a depth that I scarcely had believed possible. The shivers ran up and down my back when I heard the details of their unguided and loveless childhoods, which explained in large part the curious manner in which their minds worked. They thought only in terms of getting away with their crimes, of beating the system—although their presence here was proof that it could not be beaten. Three of the younger girls, too old for Bedford Reformatory but almost too young for the penitentiary, definitely shocked me with their plans for wrong-doing without being apprehended. They asked me about my case. “Was it true the judge gave you a chance not to go to jail if you’d promise not to break the law?”
“Yes.”