"I pass over the next few years, in which I played the fool and speculated beyond my means. Eight months ago I was in desperate need of money, although none knew of it, and I saw that my only course lay in marrying some wealthy woman.
"I looked around me and decided that Arthur Trenton's daughter would serve my purpose. I made friends with her brother and discovered to my annoyance that the young lady in question had just engaged herself to a young broker by the name of Carlton Davies and that the wedding was scheduled to take place in a very short time. This was something of a set-back, since I knew that Miss Trenton was not likely to jilt her lover for a man she was barely acquainted with. But once I make up my mind to obtain a thing I never give up until that thing is mine. I cast about for a way to make her marry me, and having cultivated her brother, Dick, for a month, I laid my plans accordingly.
"I enticed the boy, who was inclined to be wild, to a gambling-den, after I had taken the trouble to get him fairly intoxicated. I had hired a jail-bird to quarrel with Dick and when the man pretended to go for the boy, I shot and killed him, telling Dick that he had done it. He became frightened and I took him to his home, where his father was told my version of the tale, and Dick was dispatched to Chicago. Then I forced Ruth to marry me to save her brother from going to the chair for something he had never done!"
Darwin paused in his narrative to puff his cigar and to let us sufficiently admire the cleverness that had conceived such a plan. Admire! I could only shudder at the thought that there could be in existence a man who could carry out such diabolical schemes in cold-blood, and actually pride himself on his accomplishment.
"After the marriage I made Ruth sign away her dower rights as well as her dowry, all to save her brother. Then I took up my old way of living again. But now there was a fly in my ointment. People began to talk, and I had enough of my father in me to make gossip distasteful to me. Yet marriage was a bore, I discovered, and so I resurrected the lawyer, Cunningham. If as Darwin I must endure life with Ruth, as Cunningham I would be as gay as I chose. I hired an apartment and began my double life.
"When Darwin was bored to distraction by prosaic affairs, he would take a business trip and Cunningham would have his fling. When pleasures cloyed, Cunningham would be off to see his out-of-town clients and Darwin would return to the city. The excitement and the danger of detection that this sort of existence afforded fascinated me and I should have kept it up indefinitely if fate in the person of a former teller of the Darwin Bank had not intervened.
"This man, James Gilmore, who had been my dupe ten years before, and had since been in jail, was at the gambling-den the night I shot Coombs, and he realized the trick I had played upon Dick. I thought at the time when Gilmore fell that I had killed him also (I did not know him at the time. I merely shot at him on the principle that dead men tell no awkward tales), but by some freak of chance he escaped unhurt and became acquainted with Richard Trenton.
"The first intimation I had that my plans had gone awry was in a letter from Dick explaining the circumstances. I thought the matter over and finally made up my mind to go to Chicago as Cunningham, to kill Dick, and then return as Darwin, abolishing forever the character of the lawyer.
"When I reached Chicago, however, and saw Dick, a new plan, more daring, more subtle, more pleasing in every way leapt fully matured into my mind, since by means of it Darwin would disappear and Cunningham would remain, free to live his life unhampered by the marriage tie.
"Dick had grown a beard. Trim it as mine was trimmed, give him a pair of gold eyeglasses, and he could pass superficially for myself. I marveled at the likeness then. Now I know it was only natural, since it seems he was my nephew as well as my brother-in-law.