It was, or ought to have been, his duty to answer my simple civil question. What right had he to question what I wanted to know for? What business was it of his why I wanted to know? But he was of the Spokane police force and was endowed with authority. I replied, "I am without money and I am looking for a place to sleep. I thought perhaps they might give me a bed." I turned and started to leave him, but catching me roughly by the arm, he said, "Hold on here. Don't you leave me." I saw before me those horrible nights I had endured in other prisons, and my first impulse was to run. But I remembered the eighteen-year-old boy in Denver who was shot to death for running from a policeman. Then the Spokane officer said to me, "Who are you, anyway?" I answered, as I had in Pittsburg, "I am an honest working man." "And what do you do?" "I do anything I can to earn a living." He pulled me around and looked at my face on both sides, then said. "Let me see your hands." He regarded them closely, remarking, "They are pretty soft and white for a workingman's." "There are thousands of workingmen who have soft hands," I replied. "There are waiters, barbers, bookkeepers and clerks, and hundreds of positions which keep men's hands soft and white." "Yes, but your hands do not correspond with your clothes." "I wear gloves when I work. There are a great many of us fellows who do the hardest manual labor and wear blue jeans who wear gloves at our work. There is a lot of work that will lacerate the most hardy hands." His answer was, "Come with me. I am going to take you down anyway." We were not far from the jail. He did not ring up a big team of horses, a wagon and two or three men, or an automobile, to rush me to the jail as they do in other cities, although they do this in Spokane, also. We walked, and while we walked, he assured me twice that he would take the softness out of my hands by thirty days on the rock pile. He had absolutely and completely taken the law into his own hands before we ever reached the jail. This policeman knew what could and would be done to me, simply because I was apparently poor and helpless, and if their system in Spokane was as it is in other cities, I could be so nicely used for graft. Fathers and mothers throughout America, what if it had been _your_ boy in Spokane that night, without money and without a home? Think of the awful result! Put him in my place--about to receive the first stigma of a jail, to be thrust for thirty days among hardened criminals, made such by this same social system, to receive wanton insults and abuse, his health probably ruined for life,--possibly murdered! A man was dying at that very time in the city of Spokane, from abuse in that same city jail. Spokane began, from the first moment of my arrest, legally to plunder me, soul and body.