"Her refusal, flat and final, to part with the jewels enraged me. It was then that I made the first big mistake of my life.
"I lost my temper. Men who can not control their tempers under the most trying circumstances should let crime alone. They will fail.
"I killed her—a foolish result of the folly of yielding to my rage.
"Standing there and looking at her, I pondered, with all the clarity I could command. In a second, I perceived the advisability of throwing the blame upon some other person."
The faces of Braceway and Fulton mirrored to the others the horror of the stuff they were reading. The scene taxed the emotional balance of all of them. The evil-faced man at the typewriter, the father getting by degrees the description of his daughter's death, the policemen waiting to put the murderer behind bars——
Abrahamson, peculiarly wrought upon by the tenseness of it all, wished he had not come. His back felt creepy. He lit a cigarette, puffed it to a torch and threw it down.
Bristow wrote on:
"Mechanically, my fingers went to a pocket in my vest and played with two metal buttons I had picked up in my kitchen the day before, Monday.
"I knew the buttons had come from the overalls of the negro, Perry Carpenter. It would be easy to drop one there, the other on the floor of my kitchen, where I had originally found them.
"That would be the beginning of identifying him as the murderer. He had been half-drunk the day before.