He left the car at Hanson Street. I, without a glance toward him, kept on ahead. I turned at the corner, in time to see him enter an office building. I was not far behind him when he took the elevator. The man in the elevator gave me the number of his office.
He was telling a joke to his typist as I entered, but his laughter died when he saw me.
“You dirty thief! You’ll never cheat another man out of money!”
His look of astonishment, as I shouted these words, was amusing. He tried to give blow for blow, but I meant what I said when I shouted at him “I’ve come here to kill you!”
To choke the life out of an overfed beast is not so hard to an infuriated man. In less than a quarter of an hour he was dead. The police, for whom the typist had called, filled the room even before I had straightened my disheveled clothing.
I practically tried my own case, and I was skillful enough to make every word, apparently uttered in my own defense, sound black against me.
Gladys tried to save me by telling the true story of the affair, but I made a picture of her as a devoted, self-sacrificing wife, willing to ruin even her spotless name to save her husband. I enjoyed seeing her cringe as I did this.
So skillfully had she and the big brute managed that there was not a bit of evidence to substantiate her story. On the other hand, there was the typist’s story to help me, and, too, it was known I had speculated in the past, and that I had lost some money.
I made the most of everything against me, and it was enough. I was sentenced to hang on the ninth day of June at sunrise.
Gladys came to the jail to see me while the trial was going on, but I managed to act just as if my story were the true one and hers the false, and, though she pleaded with me to let the truth come out, I would not admit that the truth had not come out. The sentence was a terrible shock to her. Her mother carried her from the court-room in a faint. Before she recovered I was in prison.