“I guess you know why I killed Lakeland.”
“I heard they found ‘self defense,’” I admitted.
He swallowed a glass of wine at a gulp, then sneered with a note of irony:
“Unquestionable evidence. Lakeland is the only man who has ever even suspected that I intended to kill him when I shook hands with him.
“You can guess the first thing he did: but he was Josephine’s husband before I learned who started those stories. I felt that she hadn’t given me a fair chance to disprove all he had said and I resolved to forget her; but when I saw her getting paler and thinner because of the life she had to live, I couldn’t help feeling a sympathy for her. When Lakeland wanted to buy back the mill I had bought from his father because he had found it to be the best paying business in town, I was fool enough to tell him I’d trade with him if he would stop drinking. Of course he just told me to go to hell with my morals and threw all his money into an effort to kill my business.
“I played the game with him until all my men suddenly refused to work longer, and refused to explain why. That was too much; I shoved a pistol into my pocket and went in search of him that very afternoon. When I found him, he was, as usual, beastly drunk. To shoot him then would convict me of murder in the first degree. Besides, I couldn’t snuff his life out that way if my revenge was to be sweet. He must know about it, for half the delight of revenge would be in knowing that I had made him suffer without its costing me a thing.”
I was amazed at the mad man’s logic; for mad he certainly was.
“Of course,” he went on, “I thought first of my chemistry. He would come to liquor like a hog to slop. A little potassium cyanide in it and he would simply drop dead. There would be no symptoms of poison and the coroner’s verdict would be ‘heart failure.’ But I never drank with him and could not afford to make a special occasion for poisoning him. I merely walked by.
“‘Hello,’ he grunted. ‘Looks like I’ll have to run you clear out of town to get that mill. It isn’t half as easy to take away as your girl was.’
“Several heard it; and I wouldn’t have changed a word he said if I had had the power.