Our child has been dead nearly six months, and I have not yet heard the story of his sickness. You began it in one of your letters (now before me) when the doctor came in and told you that he would not live thirty-six hours. You screamed, and the poor little darling put his arms around your neck and said: “Mamma, don’t cry; I won’t die.” You then walked him over and showed him my picture, and asked him who it was. “That’s my papa,” was the reply. * * *
When I realize that you know I am innocent and utterly powerless, I shrink with pain to think that the wound of my child’s death has only began to heal when it is made to bleed afresh from the blow of an iron hammer in the hands of my wife, the mother of my child. * * *
You have filed an application for divorce. Now comes the struggle. I love you too well to oppose it if you ask for it. If you have asked for it because I am in the penitentiary, change your complaint, for you will have to make oath, and you know I am innocent, to which you must swear. * * * Place it upon any other grounds and I will sign the necessary papers.
Of course it is nothing to you now whether I stay here or not. I may tell you that Mrs. Forbes and Mrs. Kerns will be here to meet their husbands at the old iron door, and take them back to their affection. Who will meet me and take my hand? I will stand alone. Where will I go? * * * If you won’t come send Fankie (an adopted boy). I will let him tell me what to do.
May God forgive and direct you in the path of virtue and truth, is the prayer of your affectionate husband.
John Quinn.
P. S.—I will say good-bye with the last words of our baby’s prayer: ‘God[‘God] bless mamma and papa, grandma and grandpa, and everybody. Amen.’”[Amen.’”]
I was pardoned November 9, 1888, and two days later, when the long hoped for document reached the prison, I was discharged. I was at liberty, but carried in my heart a double desolation. Not for me did the sun shine and the face of Nature smile. In a cemetery at St. Louis was a little grave that held the sacred dust of the being once dearest to me on earth, and in my heart I carried the tomb of a buried hope.
My foreman in the prison shop, Mr. George H. Eastman, welcomed me to liberty, and invited me to his house, where I was most hospitably entertained for a week. I next went to St. Louis, but remained only one day; long enough to gaze once more at the home where I had last lived with my wife and child, now gone from me forever. A sense of utter loneliness came over me; the world seemed strange; my identity was all that I could call my own.
From St. Louis I came to Chicago, where I sought out my old friend and quondam partner, Ben Demint, whose warm greeting was a cordial to my heart, and under the influence of whose genial encouragement I began to look upon the world as not altogether lost.