Page:Weird Tales v01n01 (1923-03).djvu/164

Rh "It has come," he said, with a laugh, and walked out.

I am tall, slender, delicate-looking, but I knew I was a match for that over-fed brute.

I listened to the clatter of his feet on the stairs. Then I followed him.

HE man was hastening toward a street car.

I cranked Gladys' car and followed. It was easy to keep the street car in sight and to keep an eye on his sleek black head.

He left the car at Hanson Street. I, without a glance toward him, kept on ahead. I turned at the corner, in time to see him enter an office building. I was not far behind him when he took the elevator. The man in the elevator gave me the number of his office.

He was telling a joke to his typist as I entered, but his laughter died when he saw me.

"You dirty theifthief [sic]! You'll never cheat another man out of money!"

His look of astonishment, as I shouted these words, was amusing. He tried to give blow for blow, but I meant what I said when I shouted at him "I've come here to kill you!"

To choke the life out of an overfed beast is not so hard to an infuriated man. In less than a quarter of an hour he was dead. The police, for whom the typist had called, filled the room even before I had straightened my disheveled clothing.

I practically tried my own case, and I was skillful enough to make every word, apparently uttered in my own defense, sound black against me.

Gladys tried to save me by telling the true story of the affair, but I made a picture of her as a devoted, self-sacrificing wife, willing to ruin even her spotless name to save her husband. I enjoyed seeing her cringe as I did this.

So skillfully had she and the big brute managed that there was not a bit of evidence to substantiate her story. On the other hand, there was the typist's story to help me. and, too, it was known I had speculated in the past, and that I had lost some money.

I made the most of everything against me, and it was enough. I was sentenced to hang on the ninth day of June at sunrise.

Gladys came to the jail to see me while the trial was going on, but I managed to act just as if my story were the true one and hers the false, and, though she pleaded with me to let the truth come out, I would not admit that the truth had not come out. The sentence was a terrible shock to her. Her mother carried her from the court-room in a faint. Before she recovered I was in prison.

SHALL welcome the hour of sunrise as I never welcomed any moment of my life.

Not until then will the fear of a reprieve leave me. Gladys is moving Heaven and earth to locate the Governor. God grant that she does not succeed!

It is four forty-five. I have spent much time at the window, gazing out into the darkness. What comes after death? That is the question, I suppose, that all men ask at the end of life. I have never done so. It is a futile question—one which none of as can answer. But I believe there will be surcease from the nausea that comes to those who have known disillusion and disappointment.

Ten minutes of five—now surely I am safe from even a chance of a reprieve!

Footsteps in the corridor! Is it my escort to the gallows, or—what I fear most on earth?

STATEMENT by the warden of Larsen Penitentiary: