"No," he persisted in that level intonation with which men sometimes speak from the scaffold. "No, that won't do. You see I've whetted my appetite on anticipation—ever since that letter came. I must have the pleasure of killing you with my own hands; of seeing the breath go out of your throat—afterward the suicide will be my own."
To lay down one's life of one's own volition is one thing. To permit another to take it in a fashion of his own arbitrary selection is quite another. Hamilton Burton had never been submissive. He meant to die as he had lived—"captain of his soul," and so he turned quietly toward the window ledge where he had laid the automatic pistol. Perhaps some clairvoyant sense, loaned by the closeness of death, gave Haswell an intimation of the other's intent. He reached the window first—at a bound—and stood before it. Then suddenly a hideous expression came into his eyes until out of them shone the horror-worship that had obsessed his soul; and the maniac's cunning for draining his greed of vengeance to its dregs.
He had jostled aside the blank book containing the diary and seen the weapon, which he calmly slipped into his pocket. Then he raised the window as far as it would go.
"This is the twentieth floor," he commented with a ghastly significance. "I know because I walked up. I didn't want to be stopped—too soon. It won't take you so long to get down." As he spoke he jerked his head toward the raised blind and sash. "It's rather a symbolical finish for you, Burton—you must confess as much—an idol hurled down from his high place."
One quality Hamilton Burton possessed. If he was to die he would leave no satisfaction of final cowardice to comfort his assassin's self-destruction. He would attack—but a sudden thought stayed him.
"If we are to have a death struggle here," he asked with a strange composure, "will you give me a moment—for a matter that had no bearing on your determination?"
Haswell yet again shook his head with his executioner's smile as he sardonically inquired, "Time to get another gun?"
"No. To tear up a note to the coroner—unless you will be good enough to do it for me. If I am not to kill myself there is no advantage in an ante-mortem confession!"
"What difference does it make? To me it seems trivial."
"Just this—that my family will save my insurance out of the wreck."