It was my good fortune and delight to meet Dr. Bushnell and Mrs. Andrew in Bombay, at the time when Lord Roberts had contradicted their statements about procuring women for British soldiers in India—"Queen's women" as they were called. Upon being convinced that Dr. Bushnell and Mrs Andrew had told the truth, Lord Roberts, then commander-in-chief of the forces in India, said, "I apologize to the ladies without reserve."
E. A. B.
CHAPTER XVII.
HOW SNAKES CHARM CANARIES: METHODS OF PROCURERS.
At the end of May, 1907, Rev. Melbourne P. Boynton, pastor of the Lexington Avenue Baptist Church, was requested by the Chicago Examiner to make a tour of the vice district at Twenty-second street and write against its iniquities for the columns of that newspaper. Pastor Boynton stipulated that I should accompany him, as a recognized worker in the slums and superintendent of the Midnight Mission. Rev. E. L. Williams, a Methodist pastor, also accompanied us, with Detectives Considine and Thomas of the Chicago police.
As we went out I prayed God to give us a thunderbolt to alarm the people of Chicago. We did not foresee the answer to this prayer, but I have always felt that it was answered very quickly and in the following manner:
Shortly after one o'clock on the morning of May 31, we entered a resort on Dearborn street, whose former owner had come to me at midnight to tell me that he had not had one happy minute since he took up that terrible business and that he would quit it, which he did. In this place among the half-dressed inmates we noticed a modestly gowned young woman, sitting at a small drinking table opposite something that ought to have been a man. The thing's name was Neil Jaeger; the girl's name was Macdonald. I asked the girl if she were an inmate or leading a life of that sort and she said no. She told me her true name and address and lied only about her age, as Jaeger had taught her to say she was twenty, when she was only sixteen, that he might sell her in the white slave market. The keeper of the resort, convinced that she was under age, had refused to deal with him. When I began to question the snake, it hissed, "Mind your own business." I replied that this was my business, and asked the detectives to investigate. Discerning quickly what it was that we had discovered, they promptly locked the thing in an iron cage, like any other wild beast. The girl was cared for. Her anxiety was expressed in her words, "What will my mother say?"
At the trial of Jaeger before Judge Fake, he himself told brazenly how he had brought this young girl from her own home in an Illinois town, her mother supposing that she was going to work in Rockford. While the girl was giving her testimony I heard the click of a camera, to my sorrow—for we were doing our utmost to keep the girl's secret and to send her quietly to her mother. More than half a million copies of her photograph went out in the great daily papers of Chicago. When the truth was known, other young girls told what they had escaped by the capture and exposure of this reptile, for he was luring several of them to Chicago, one of them only fifteen years old. About half a million pages were published in the Chicago newspapers at this time against the traffic in girls. Such, it seemed to me, was the thunderbolt, for which I had prayed.