The Mute Refugee of Tacoma

The Tacoma newsmen yesterday note that there has been found at the St. Nicholas Hotel an employee there, a cook. He said he would leave, but it was soon learned that he was still around, and when that news leaked, he headed for Old Tacoma. He was soon surrounded by a guard of men who compelled him aboard the Zephyr and sent him to Seattle. On transition, John fell into Mr. O'Brien's company and was driven to Chief of Police Weichbrodt’s place of business at the wharf for his further deliverance. John says he will leave this section for down the Sound. He says further that he is not a Chinaman; that he was born in Honolulu and his father was Portuguese and his mother a Kanaka; that he was a soldier in the American army, the Tennessee, the Tennessee Volunteers, and has a discharge paper which he worked on dated 1865. The fact of his being less than forty years of age when he was a brave soldier, and of the changes in his facial features, does not bother him at all. He told a reporter, 'I don't like to talk—I don't like to call anybody Chinaman.' Mr. Hankins, for that is his name, clips his hair short, yet he looks wonderfully like a Chinaman.