KITTY SCHAY.
(This story is clipped from The National Prohibitionist.)
Another of the horrid stories that have come to light in the work of the Law and Order League of Chicago is that of a young girl who may be known here as Kitty Schay. This girl was born in Milwaukee twenty-one years ago, and became an orphan when only four years old. She was brought up in the home of an aunt who seems to have been a good woman, but somewhat unfeeling, and was given little or no opportunity for education, going to work at any early age.
Seeking amusement and companionship that her home did not give her, the poor girl began to frequent the public halls where dances were given, under saloon auspices, and came to attract much admiration and secure many acquaintances because of her graceful dancing. These associations led to late hours, and although the girl, under circumstances that made truthtelling likely, insists that she was guilty of no offenses against virtue, her aunt became angry with her and drove her from her home.
Thrust upon her own resources, the poor creature sought work, living in a cheerless furnished room, and found her associations for companionship and pleasure at dances and in concert halls and in the back rooms of some of the numerous gin mills that flourish in the city of Milwaukee, with the approval and consent of so many of that city's good people.
Thus she lived, comparatively blameless, amid perils and temptations, until one night she was introduced to a young woman who offered her a position in Chicago where she could earn "good wages." The winter was coming on. The child had no store of winter clothing and looked forward to the terrible days of December and January with dread. She realized that the scanty pay for which she worked would buy her little of what she needed, and when the temptress talked to her of what seemed to her fabulous pay she consented all too willingly.
Perhaps she did not inquire too closely into the character of the work to which she was going. She had begun to drink, indeed, she says she was partially intoxicated at that moment with drink that had been furnished her by the woman and a male companion. At least, she agreed to go, and at the depot in Chicago was met by a closed hack in which she was taken at once to one of the dives of Chicago's greatest vice preserve where the police, to whom she glibly told the story that she had been instructed to tell, speedily enrolled her as a woman of the "underworld."
Then began two months of horror. Exposure to disease, unthinkable brutality, degradation never before dreamed of—these were her portion in a full cup; and the alluring prospect of pay that had baited the trap faded away and she received in return for all this nothing but the barest, scantiest living.
At length a frequenter of the place, in whom honest impulses were not wholly dead, moved by her sorrowful story, fought her way out of the dive and reported the case to the Law and Order League.
The police have sent the poor creature back to Milwaukee to what improvement of fate it may well be imagined. And the vice mills grind on, and the police are busy "registering" new victims.