After he had bought the ticket and put her aboard the train going to Blank City, he wrote the name of the woman to whom he was sending her, gave her about $2 extra and then delivered this fatherly advice to her:
"You're just a young girl and it's best for you not to talk to anybody on the train or after you get off. Don't show this paper to anybody or tell anybody where you're going. It isn't any of their business, anyway. And as soon as you get off the train you'll find plenty of cabs there. Hand your paper to the first cab driver in the line, get in and ride to Mrs. A——'s home. Pay the driver and then walk in."
Believing that she was being furnished a position by a remarkably kind man, the poor girl followed his directions implicitly—and landed the next day in one of the most notorious houses of shame in the state of Illinois outside of Chicago. How she was found and rescued is a story quite apart from the purpose which has led me to tell of this incident—that of indicating how tightly the slave traders have their nets spread for even the most ordinary and unattractive prey. They let no girl escape whom they dare to approach!
It may be well and to the point to add, however, that two other girls who had been in care of the State Home were found to be in the same house to which the girl had been lured, and they were also recovered.
Almost at the beginning of my experience I received a penciled note which I have kept on my desk as a stimulus to my energies and my watchfulness along the line of checkmating the work of the white slavers. It is very brief and terse—but what a story it tells! Here is a copy of it—with the substitution of a fictitious name:
"Ellen Holmes has been sold for $50.00 to Madame Blank's house at —— Armour avenue."
The statement was true—and the man who sold her and the woman who bought her were both sent to the state penitentiary as a penalty for the transaction!
Another fact which the public finds hard to believe—especially the public of mothers—is that girls who are lured into the life of shame find it impossible to make their escape, and that they are prisoners and slaves in every sense of the word. I recall one instance of a girl from a good home who had fallen into the hands of a white slave trader and been sold to a house in the red-light district. Her people were frantic over her disappearance and made every possible effort to locate her, but without success. Several months after the excitement and publicity aroused by her disappearance died away, a newsboy who had delivered papers at her home—which was in a very good residence district of the city—happened to be passing along a cross street of the red-light section—just on the fringe of it, in fact. Suddenly he heard a tap on the window, looked up and saw the anxious face of the lost girl. Then she disappeared.
Knowing the story of her strange disappearance, he hurried straight to her home and told of his experience. Instantly the father secured officers and the little newsboy led the posse back to the house, in the window of which he had caught a glimpse of her face. They raided the place and rescued the girl. The story of the terrible treatment which she had received cannot be told here. It is enough to say that she had been held as a captive, imprisoned as much as any inmate of a penitentiary is imprisoned, and that if the friendly newsboy had not happened to pass as he did, the window from which she was looking out, she would undoubtedly be there today or in some other similar prison of shame through the process of exchange.
One other matter in this connection needs to come in for clear and decisive emphasis: the fact that the runaway marriage is the favorite device of the white slaver for landing victims who could not otherwise be entrapped. These alleged summer resorts and excursion centers which are well advertised as Gretna Greens, and as places where the usual legal and official formalities preliminary to respectable marriage are reduced to a minimum, are star recruiting stations for the white slave traffic. I have never seen this point brought out with any degree of clearness in any article, and I earnestly urge all mothers to give this statement the most serious consideration, and never to allow a daughter to go to one of these places on an excursion or under any pretext whatever, unless accompanied by some older member of the family. And even then there is something unwholesome and contaminating in the very atmosphere of such a place.