William Ellis - Billy Sunday

"'My time is not my own until ten o'clock. You go upstairs until then and I'll buy you a good supper and get you a good, warm, clean bed in which to sleep, but I'll not give you the money.'

"He said, 'Thank you, I'll go.' He stayed for the meeting. I saw he was moved, and after the meeting I stood by his side. He wept and I talked to him about Jesus Christ, and he told me this story:

"There were three boys in the family. They lived in Boston. The father died, the will was probated, he was given his portion, took it, started out drinking and gambling. At last he reached Denver, his money was gone, and he got a position as fireman in the Denver and Rio Grande switchyards. His mother kept writing to him, but he told me that he never read the letters. He said that when he saw the postmark and the writing he threw the letter into the firebox, but one day, he couldn't tell why, he opened the letter and it read:

"'Dear – : I haven't heard from you directly, but I am sure that you must need a mother's care in the far-off West, and unless you answer this in a reasonable time I'm going to Denver to see you.' And she went on pleading, as only a mother could, and closed it: 'Your loving mother.'

"He said, 'I threw the letter in the fire and paid no more heed to it. One day about two weeks later I saw a woman coming down the track and I said to the engineer: "That looks like my mother." She drew near, and I said: "Yes, that's mother." What do you think I did?'

"I said, 'Why you climbed out of your engine, kissed her and asked God to forgive you.'

"He said, 'I did nothing of the kind. I was so low-down, I wouldn't even speak to my mother. She followed me up and down the switchyard and even followed me to my boarding house. I went upstairs, changed my clothes, came down, and she said, "Frank, stay and talk with me." I pushed by her and went out and spent the night in sin. I came back in the morning, changed my clothes and went to work. For four days she followed me up and down the switchyards and then she said, "Frank, you have broken my heart, and I am going away tomorrow."

"'I happened to be near the depot with the engine when she got on the train and she raised the window and said, "Frank, kiss me good-bye." I stood talking with some of my drinking and gambling friends and one man said, "Frank Adsitt, you are a fool to treat your mother like that. Kiss her good-bye." I jerked from him and turned back. I heard the conductor call "All aboard." I heard the bell on the engine ring and the train started out, and I heard my mother cry, "Oh, Frank, if you won't kiss me good-bye, for God's sake turn and look at me!"

"'Mr. Sunday, when the train on the Burlington Railroad pulled out of Denver, I stood with my back to my mother. That's been nine years ago and I have never seen nor heard from her.'

"I led him to Jesus. I got him a position in the old Exposition building on the lake front. He gave me the money he didn't need for board and washing. I kept his money for months. He came to me one day and asked for it.

"He used to come to the noon meetings every day. Finally I missed him, and I didn't see him again until in June, 1893, during the World's Fair he walked into the Y. M. C. A. I said, 'Why, Frank, how do you do?'

"He said, 'How do you know me?'

"I said, 'I have never forgotten you; how is your mother?'

"He smiled, then his face quickly changed to sadness, and he said, 'She is across the street in the Brevoort House. I am taking her to California to fill her last days with sunshine.'

"Three months later, out in Pasadena, she called him to her bedside, drew him down, kissed him, and said, 'Good-bye; I can die happy because I know my boy is a Christian.'"

"I have reached down into the slime, and have been privileged to help tens of thousands out of the mire of sin – and I believe that most of them will be saved, too. I've helped men in all walks of life. When I was in Chicago I helped a man and got him a position, and so was able to restore him to his wife and children. One night a fellow came to me and told me that the man was playing faro bank down on Clark Street. I said: 'Why that can hardly be – I took dinner with him only a few hours ago.'

"But my informant had told me the truth, so I put on my coat and went down LaSalle Street and past the New York Life Building and along up the stairway to the gambling room. I went past the big doorkeeper, and I found a lot of men in there, playing keno and faro bank and roulette and stud and draw poker. I saw my man there, just playing a hand. In a moment he walked over to the bar and ordered a Rhine wine and seltzer.

[Illustration: The Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago, where Billy Sunday was Converted.]

"I walked over and touched him on the shoulder, and he looked and turned pale. I said, 'Come out of this. Come with me.' He said, 'Here's my money,' and pulled $144 from his pocket and handed it to me. 'I don't want your money.' He refused at first, and it was one o'clock in the morning before I got him away from there. I took him home and talked to him, then I sent down into Ohio for an old uncle of his, for he had forged notes amounting to $2,000 or so, and we had to get him out of trouble. We got him all fixed up and we got him a job selling relief maps, and he made $5,000 a year.

"I didn't hear from him for a long time; then one day Jailor Whitman called me up and told me that Tom Barrett, an old ball player I knew well, wanted me to come up and see a man who had been sentenced to the penitentiary. I went down to the jail and the prisoner was my friend. I asked him what was the matter, and he said that he and some other fellows had framed up a plan to stick up a jewelry store. He was caught and the others got away. He wouldn't snitch, and so he was going down to Joliet on an indeterminate sentence of from one to fourteen years. He said: 'You are the only man that will help me. Will you do it?'

"I said: 'I won't help you, I won't spend so much as a postage stamp on you if you are going to play me dirt again!' He promised to do better as soon as he got out, and I wrote a letter to my friend, Andy Russell, chairman of the board of pardons. He took up the case and we got my friend's sentence cut down to a maximum of five years.

"Time passed again, and one day he came in dressed fit to kill. He had on an $80 overcoat, a $50 suit, a $4 necktie, a pair of patent leather shoes that cost $15, shirt buttons as big as hickory nuts and diamond cuff buttons. He walked up to my desk in the Y. M. C. A. and pulled out a roll of bills. There were a lot of them – yellow fellows. I noticed that there was one for $500. There was over $4,500 in the roll. He said: 'I won it last night at faro bank.' He asked me to go out to dinner with him and I went. We had everything on the bill of fare, from soup to nuts, and the check was $7.60 apiece for two suppers. I've never had such a dinner since.

"We talked things over. He said he was making money hand over fist – that he could make more in a week than I could in a year. I was working at the Y. M. C. A. for $83 a month, and then not getting it, and baseball managers were making me tempting offers of good money to go back into the game at $500 to $1,000 a month to finish the season. But I wouldn't do it. Nobody called me a grafter then. 'Well,' I said to my friend, 'old man, you may have more at the end of the year than I've got – maybe I won't have carfare – but I'll be ahead of you.'

"Where is he now? Down at Joliet, where there is a big walled institution and where the stripes on your clothes run crossways."

"I had a friend who was a brilliant young fellow. He covered the Chino-Japanese war for a New York paper. He was on his way home when he was shipwrecked, and the captain and he were on an island living on roots for a week and then they signaled a steamer and got started home. He got word from the New York Tribune and they told him to go to Frisco, so he went, and they told him to come across the arid country and write up the prospects of irrigation. And as he walked across those plains, he thought of how they would blossom if they were only irrigated. Then he thought of how his life was like that desert, with nothing in it but waste.