But while she talked and the doctor smiled, a small key fitting nothing in particular was laid by Dr. Zeller close at hand and it disappeared in ten seconds. Likewise a pencil from the doctor's pocket found its way almost unnoticed into "Fainting Bertha's" blonde hair. Her smiling face all turned to frowns when finally, one at a time, he took the key from her waist and the pencil from its hiding place in her hair.
"Did you ever know a man named Gunther?" asked Dr. Zeller suddenly.
"Yes—what of it?" she asked quickly, with a show of nervousness.
"He is in the penitentiary."
"Good! Good!" exclaimed the girl. "I'm delighted to hear it. He ought to have been there long ago, and he ought to stay there the rest of his life!"
This was the man whom Bertha charged with responsibility for her first wrong step as a girl, sending her first to the Glenwood (Ia.) Home for the Feebleminded. Later she charges that this man taught her the fainting trick, by which she faints in the arms of a man or woman wearing jewelry or carrying money and in the confusion biting the stone from a pin and swallowing it, or with small, supple hand taking a purse from a pocket or a watch from its fob, perhaps with innocent eyes and dimpled face assisting the loser in the search for the missing valuable.
Bertha Says Gunther Promised To Marry Her.
"That man Gunther promised to marry me," she said, lowering her voice. "He sent me out to steal and when I wouldn't do it he used to beat me when I came home. Do you wonder I'm what I am?"
There was a burst of what might have been tears. Her face was buried and her figure shook with sobs. But in five seconds the dimpled face appeared again, dry eyed, and at a remark on the moment she turned toward her auditors, winking an eyelid slyly.
"Fainting Bertha" Lebecke has almost lost consecutive track of the asylums and prisons in which she has been locked.