Then one day Michael discovered something that broke him up completely. His little girls’ mother was not the kind of woman he had believed her to be. It cost Michael more than outsiders could realize, but he got a divorce. The court gave him the custody of his daughters, Rosie and Maggie.
He brought them to Kansas City in an effort to forget--and to get away from their mother. He put them in St. Joseph’s Orphan Home, Thirty-first and Jefferson streets, and went to work there himself as coachman.
But the mother did not stay in Airdale. She followed her children here and tried to take them away from the home. Several times she tried it, but the watch kept on the little girls was too close and she did not succeed. At last, Michael, fearing that sooner or later he would lose them, gave up his job and took the girls away. Rosie, the elder, did not want to go. Even in those days she was attached to her mother.
Michael took Rosie and Maggie to Seattle, where he put them in a convent. Most of his earnings went to pay for keeping them there. After a year or two he joined the navy and intrusted to Uncle Sam the payments for their education from his wages as a sailor.
The long voyages kept him from seeing them more than once or twice a year and he fancied they were forgetting him. That, and the difficulty of providing for them on what he was earning, made him desperate. He deserted the navy. He took his daughters from the convent and made a home for them.
One day when he was away at work a veiled woman drove up to the cottage in a motor car.
“Why, it’s mamma!” exclaimed Rosie, and rushed to greet her.
When the woman drove away, the girls and their belongings went with her. Michael came home that night to an empty house.
He found them in Airdale--in their mother’s house, where the blinds were drawn all day long. He started habeas corpus proceedings and got back the younger girl, then 15 years old. Rosie had become 18 in the meantime and refused to leave her mother.
Michael took Maggie to St. Louis and put her in a convent there. Up to this time the government officials had not troubled him and he had almost forgotten that his desertion was still hanging over him. But someone told, and Michael was arrested. He was convicted and taken to the naval prison in New Hampshire.