In the morning, since he does not appear as usual, two men break open the attic door and find him there.
“Suicide?” says one.
“Starvation, more likely,” says the other.
“No, here’s bread and cheese. Case for the coroner, anyway. Cheerful sort of a den he lived in. Hullo, what’s this he’s been writing?”
One of them reads what the dead man has written, and says:
“It’s peculiar stuff. I can’t just make it out. Look at his hand; he’s got an old newspaper in it gripped like a vise.”
He stoops and forces the old paper from the cold fingers. He examines it from curiosity and dully stumbles upon the truth.
“Say, Bill,” he says, “here’s a funny thing. This old newspaper’s got an article in it very near exactly the same as that thing the gent wrote himself.”
(Houston Daily Post, Friday morning, November 29, 1895.)