I spent hours thinking of tender, loving things to do for her. She accepted everything quietly, sometimes with averted face and flushed cheeks. I would draw her inert figure into my arms and hold her close, but she made no response to my demonstrative affection.
At this stage of affairs my firm sent me on a ten-day trip to close a Western deal. It was hard to leave Gladys, but now, more than ever, I felt that we would need money, and lots of it.
We arranged for Gladys to go to her mother’s, and I was to join her there on my return.
It is the same old story. I came home before I was expected, and went straight to our cottage, with the intention of having Glady’s room redecorated before bringing her home.
At the gate stood Gladys’ car. I rushed into the house, but there was no one on the lower floor, nor in Gladys’ room, nor mine. I was about to descend the stairs when I heard a low laugh--a man’s laugh--from the third floor. I dashed up there and stood gazing at the closed door of the spare room.
“What’s the idea, running away from me?” asked the man. “You can’t blow hot and cold with me.”
“I told you not to come here again. It’s not safe.”
“I’m not afraid of that husband of yours. You’re mine, and you’re going to stay mine.”
I had listened intently, but could not recognize the man’s voice.
“Go now,” pleaded Gladys, “and I’ll come to your rooms this evening.”
“Not on your life! I’m here now, and I am going to stay.”
“Let go of me--you are hurting my shoulder.”
There was a sound of scuffing. I tried the door. It was locked. I put my shoulder to it. The lock snapped.
Gladys gave a cry, leaped away from the man--a man whom I had never seen before. The full-lipped, black-browed type, big, soft. As I took in the scene--the tousled woman, the flushed-faced man--a great wave of disgust almost overwhelmed me.
“Well,” said the man, sneeringly, “what are you going to do about it?”
“If you take her away now and treat her right--nothing.”
“And if I don’t take her away?”
“I’ll meet that situation when it comes.”
“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 overfed brute.
I listened to the clatter of his feet on the stairs. Then I followed him.
* * * * *
The 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 thief! 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.
* * * * *
I 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 us 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?
* * * * *
A statement by the warden of Larsen Penitentiary:
“_If Traylor had spent the brief period, always allotted to a criminal for a few last words, his reprieve would have reached us in time to stay the execution; but he walked calmly, unfalteringly up to the gallows and helped us, with steady hands, adjust the cap and ropes--and he was dead two minutes before the Governor’s message reached us._”
_For a Grim Tale With a Terrifying End We Recommend_
_The_ SKULL
_By_ HAROLD WARD
Kimball held up his hand, warningly.
“Listen!” he exclaimed in a whisper.
Then he shoved the bottle back from his elbow and reached for his revolver, which hung just above the table. Buckling the belt about his waist, he leaped for the door and threw it open.
The house, raised on pile foundations a dozen feet above the ground, shook beneath the rush of retreating footsteps. With the swiftness of a wild animal, he gathered himself for the spring--and landed squarely astride the back of the last of the blacks to quit the place.
The weight of the white man brought the native to the ground. Seizing the black by the hair, he jerked him to his feet, keeping the naked body between himself and the crowd that lurked in the darkness, just beyond the ring of light that shone down through the open door.
“What name?” he demanded in the _beche-de-mer_ of the Islands. “What for you come around big fella house? I knock seven bells out of you quick!”
Still grasping the man’s kinky wool with his left hand, his right shot out, landing a terrific blow on the native’s mouth. The black, spitting blood and broken teeth, squirmed in agony and attempted to give a side glance at his fellows. Seeing that none intended to aid him, he jerked his head to one side in an effort to escape. The white man straightened it with another blow.
“What name?” he demanded again.
“Me good fella boy,” the black answered with an effort. “Me fella missionary!”
“Then you say one fella prayer damn quick!”
Kimball rained blow after blow on his face. The savage shrieked with agony. In the shadow, the blacks shuffled uneasily, like a herd of cattle ready to stampede, but the white man seemingly gave them no heed.
At last, the punishment completed, he jerked the bow and arrows from the unresisting hand of his victim and, whirling him suddenly, gave him a kick and a shove which landed him on all fours in the midst of the others. Then, turning, seemingly ignoring the thoroughly frightened blacks, he reëntered the house.
Throwing the bow and arrows on the table, he poured himself a stiff drink of gin and downed it at a gulp. And then, sitting down beside the table, he picked up the weapon and examined it gingerly.
“Poisoned!” he remarked casually to the man lying on the bed. “I knocked bloody hell out of Tulagi as a lesson to the rest of ’em. They’re getting insolent, with only one of us to handle ’em. Wish to heaven you were up and around again.”
“Upon the platform, eh?” the sick man listlessly inquired.
Kimball nodded.
“They’re gettin’ bold,” he said shortly. “Five hundred niggers are too many for one man to keep straight. It’s been plain hell since you went down--and then the dog had to turn up his toes. When Donaldson comes in next week with the _Scary-Saray_ we’ll have to send after a new nigger-chaser. Chipin’s got a couple extra ones he’s been trainin’ over at Berande.”
The sick man rolled over with a groan.
“Thank heaven I was taken sick!” he remarked bitterly. “It’s hard, God knows, but it gave me a chance to find out just what sort of a cur you are, Kimball.”
Kimball scowled. He half opened his mouth as if to answer. Then, thinking better of it, he poured himself another drink and resumed his occupation of examining the weapon he had taken from the native. He swayed slightly in his chair under the load of liquor he was carrying, yet his voice was unblurred as, after a minute’s silence, he looked across at the other.