Cast Adrift

TO THE READER.

IN this romance of real life, in which the truth is stranger than the fiction, I have lifted only in part the veil that hides the victims of intemperance and other terrible vices--after they have fallen to the lower deeps of degradation to be found in our large cities, where the vile and degraded herd together more like wild beasts than men and women--and told the story of sorrow, suffering, crime and debasement as they really exist in Christian America with all the earnestness and power that in me lies.

Strange and sad and terrible as are some of the scenes from which I hare drawn this veil, I have not told the half of what exists. My book, apart from the thread of fiction that runs through its pages, is but a series of photographs from real life, and is less a work of the imagination than a record of facts.

If it stirs the hearts of American readers profoundly, and so awakens the people to a sense of their duty; if it helps to inaugurate more earnest and radical modes of reform for a state of society of which a distinguished author has said, “There is not a country throughout the earth on which it would not bring a curse; there is no religion upon the earth that it would not deny; there is no people upon the earth it would not put to shame;”--then will not my work be in vain.

Sitting in our comfortable homes with well-fed, well-clothed and happy-hearted children about us--children who have our tenderest care, whose cry of pain from a pin-prick or a fall on the carpeted floor hurts us like a blow---how few of us know or care anything about the homes in which some other children dwell, or of the hard and cruel battle for life they are doomed to fight from the very beginning!

To get out from these comfortable homes and from the midst of tenderly cared-for little ones, and stand face to face with squalor and hunger, with suffering, debasement and crime, to look upon the starved faces of children and hear their helpless cries, is what scarcely one in a thousand will do. It is too much for our sensibilities. And so we stand aloof, and the sorrow, and suffering, the debasement, the wrong and the crime, go on, and because we heed it not we vainly imagine that no responsibility lies at our door; and yet there is no man or woman who is not, according to the measure of his or her influence, responsible for the human debasement and suffering I have portrayed.

The task I set for myself has not been a pleasant one. It has hurt my sensibilities and sickened my heart many times as I stood face to face with the sad and awful degradation that exists in certain regions of our larger cities; and now that my work is done, I take a deep breath of relief. The result is in your hands, good citizen, Christian reader, earnest philanthropist! If it stirs your heart in the reading as it stirred mine in the writing, it will not die fruitless.

THE AUTHOR.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I. The unwelcome babe--The defrauded young mother--The struggle between life and death--“Your baby is in heaven”--A brief retrospect--A marriage for social position--An ambitious wife and a disappointed husband--The young daughter--The matrimonial market--The Circassian slaves of modern society--The highest bidder--Disappearance--The old sad story--Secret marriage--The letters--Disappointed ambition--Interview between the parents--The mother's purpose--“Baffled, but not defeated”--The father's surprise--The returned daughter--Forgiven--“I am not going away again, father dear”--Insecurity and distrust

CHAPTER II. The hatred of a bad woman--Mrs. Dinneford's plans for the destruction of Granger--Starting in business--Plots of Mrs. Dinneford and Freeling--The discounted notes--The trap--Granger's suspicions aroused--Forgery--Mrs. Dinneford relentless--The arrest--Fresh evidence of crime upon Granger's person--The shock to Edith--“That night her baby was born”

CHAPTER III. “It is a splendid boy”--A convenient, non-interfering family doctor--Cast adrift--Into the world in a basket, unnamed and disowned--Edith's second struggle back to life--Her mind a blank--Granger convicted of forgery--Seeks to gain knowledge of his child--The doctor's evasion and ignorance--An insane asylum instead of State's prison--Edith's slow return to intelligence--“There's something I can't understand, mother”--“Where is my baby?”--“What of George?”--No longer a child, but a broken hearted woman--The divorce

CHAPTER IV. Sympathy between father and daughter--Interest in public charities--A dreadful sight--A sick babe in the arms of a half-drunken woman--“Is there no law to meet such cases?”---“The poor baby has no vote!”--Edith seeks for the grave of her child, but cannot find it--She questions her mother, who baffles her curiosity--Mrs. Bray's visit--Interview between Mrs. Dinneford and Mrs. Bray--“The baby isn't living?”--“Yes; I saw it day before yesterday in the arms of a beggar-woman”--Edith's suspicions aroused--Determined to discover the fate of her child--Visits the doctor--“Your baby is in heaven”--“Would to God it were so, for I saw a baby in hell not long ago!”

CHAPTER V. Mrs. Dinneford visits Mrs. Bray--“The woman to whom you gave that baby was here yesterday”--The woman must be put out of the way--Exit Mrs. Dinneford, enter Pinky Swett--“You know your fate--New Orleans and the yellow fever”--“All I want of you is to keep track of the baby”--Division of the spoils--Lucky dreams--Consultation of the dream-book for lucky figures--Sam McFaddon and his backer, who “drives in the Park and wears a two thousand dollar diamond pin”--The fate of a baby begged with--The baby must not die--The lottery-policies

CHAPTER VI. Rottenness at the heart of a great city--Pinky Swett's attempted rescue of a child from cruel beating--The fight--Pinky's arrest--Appearance of the “queen”--Pinky's release at her command--The queen's home--The screams of children being beaten--The rescue of “Flanagan's Nell”--Death the great rescuer--“They don't look after things in here as they do outside--Everybody's got the screws on, and things must break sometimes, but it isn't called murder--The coroner understands it all”

CHAPTER VII. Pinky Swett at the mercy of the crowd in the street--Taken to the nearest station-house--Mrs. Dinneford visits Mrs. Bray again--Fresh alarms--“She's got you in her power”---“Money is of no account”--The knock at the door--Mrs. Dinneford in hiding--The visitor gone--Mrs. Bray reports the woman insatiable in her demands--Must have two hundred dollars by sundown--No way of escape except through police interference--“People who deal with the devil generally have the devil to pay”--Suspicion--A mistake--Sound of feet upon the stairs--Mrs. Dinneford again in hiding--Enter Pinky Swett--Pinky disposed of--Mrs. Dinneford again released--Mrs. Bray's strategy--“Let us be friends still, Mrs. Bray”--Mrs. Dinneford's deprecation and humiliation--Mrs. Bray's triumph

CHAPTER VIII. Mrs. Bray receives a package containing two hundred dollars--“Poor baby! I must see better to its comfort”--Pinky meets a young girl from the country--The “Ladies' Restaurant”--Fried oysters and sangaree--The “bindery” girl--“My head feels strangely”--Through the back alley--The ten-cent lodging house--Robbery--A second robbery--A veil drawn--A wild prolonged cry of a woman--The policeman listens only for a moment, and then passes on--Foul play--“In all our large cities are savages more cruel and brutal in their instincts than the Comanches”--Who is responsible?

CHAPTER IX. Valuation of the spoils--The receiver--The “policy-shop” and its customers--A victim of the lottery mania

CHAPTER X. “Policy-drunkards”--A newly-appointed policeman's blunder--The end of a “policy-drunkard”--Pinky and her friend in consultation over “a cast-off baby in Dirty alley”--“If you can't get hush-money out of its mother, you can bleed Fanny Bray”--The way to starve a baby--Pinky moves her quarters without the use of “a dozen furniture cars”--A baby's home--The baby's night nurse--The baby's supper--The baby's bed--How the baby's money is spent--Where the baby's nurse passes the night--The baby's disappearance

CHAPTER XI. Reserve between mother and daughter--Mrs. Dinneford disapproves of Edith's charitable visits--Mrs. Dinneford meets Freeling by appointment at a hotel--“There's trouble brewing”--“A letter from George Granger”--Accused of conspiracy--Possibility of Granger's pardon by the governor--An ugly business--In great peril--Freeling's threats of exposure--A hint of an alternative

CHAPTER XII. Mr. Freeling fails to appear at his place of business--Examination of his bank accounts--It is discovered that he has borrowed largely of his friends--Mrs. Dinneford has supplied him $20,000 from her private purse--Mrs. Dinneford falls sick, and temporarily loses her reason--“I told you her name was Gray--Gray, not Bray”--Half disclosures--Recovery--Mother and daughter mutually suspicious--The visitor--Mrs. Dinneford equal to the emergency--Edith thrown off the track

CHAPTER XIII. Edith is satisfied that her babe is alive--She has a desire to teach the children of the poor--“My baby may become like one of these”--She hears of a baby which has been stolen--Resolves to go and see it, and to apply to Mr. Paulding of the Briar street mission for assistance in her attempt--Mr. Paulding persuades her that it is best not to see the child, and promises that he himself will look after it--Returns home--Her father remonstrates with her, finally promises to help her

CHAPTER XIV. Mr. Dinneford sets out for the mission-house--An incident on the way--Encounters Mr. Paulding--Mr. Paulding makes his report--“The vicious mark their offspring with unmistakable signs of moral depravity; this baby has signs of a better origin”--A profitable conversation--“I think you had better act promptly”

CHAPTER XV. Mr. Dinneford with a policeman goes in quest of the baby--The baby is gone--Inquiries--Mr. Dinneford resolves to persevere--Cause of the baby's disappearance--Pinky Swett's curiosity--Change of baby's nurse--Baby's improved condition--Baby's first experience of motherly tenderness--Baby's first smile--“Such beautiful eyes”--Pinky Swett visits the St. John mission-school--Edith is not there

CHAPTER XVI. Mr. Dinneford's return, and Edith's disappointment--“It is somebody's baby, and it may be mine”--An unsuspected listener--Mrs. Dinneford acts promptly--Conference between Mrs. Dinneford and Mrs. Hoyt, alias Bray--The child must be got out of the way--“If it will not starve, it must drown”--Mrs. Dinneford sees an acquaintance as she leaves Mrs. Hoyt's, and endeavors to escape his observation--A new danger and disgrace awaiting her

CHAPTER XVII. Mental conditions of mother and daughter--Mr. Dinneford aroused to a sense of his moral responsibilities--The heathen in our midst--The united evil of policy-lotteries and whisky-shops--The education of the policy-shops

CHAPTER XVIII. News item: “A child drowned”--Another news item: Pinky Swett sentenced to prison for robbery--Baby's improved condition--Mrs. Burke's efforts to retain the baby after Pinky Swett's imprisonment--Baby Andy's rough life in the street--Mrs. Burke's death--Cast upon the world--Andy's adventures--He finds a home and a friend