Page:Weird Tales v01n01 (1923-03).djvu/136



An Anonymous Author Gives a Startling Answer in

N A MEAN, miserable, two-dollar-a-week bedroom in a Chicago lodging-house a young man was calmly and deliberately preparing to kill himself.

He possessed youth, health, affluence and comeliness—and yet he was preparing to kill himself. Calmly and deliberately. In the shabby room of a shabby hovel.

With a penknife, he was ripping bedclothes to ribbons and wedging them into chinks and crannies. At last satisfied that the room was as near gas-tight as he could make it, he stripped to his underclothing and sat down at the battered bureau and began to write:


 * "As soon as my dead body is found the newspapers will want to know why I did it. I'll tell them. And they may scarehead it as much as they like. I don't care. I've destroyed every clue to my identity, and though I am wealthy enough to be pointed to and stared at, there is not one in this vast city whom I know, not one who cares

Rh