SCENE II--Furnished with descriptions of the two
fleeing holdup men, another policeman at 4 o’clock at Tenth and Holmes streets, arrests Ed Wilson, our hero of “Real 1.”
REAL IV.
At police headquarters today Wilson is identified by Mathis as one of the pair who held him up.
Wilson agrees with him and tells his partner’s name.
Mathis then goes to the hospital, but fails to identify the wounded man, who gives the name of Harry Walters.
From this Wilson gathers that the wounded man is not his pal.
But who, then, is he?
“You say this Hoover cop picked up something when he shot the fellow?” queries Wilson.
“What was it?”
“A black mask, eh? Well, ain’t that the limit?”
“Why, that must be the fellow we held up to begin with and turned loose because he was in the business.
“And here he goes and gets shot because a cop thinks he looks like me. That’s luck for you!”
* * * * *
STREET CAR BANDIT
_Los Angeles Times_
Two pairs of arms entwined the neck of Harry Blair, wounded and confessed streetcar bandit, as he lay chained to a cot in the Emergency Hospital yesterday morning. While his young wife embraced him, sobbing, their year-old baby laughed and cooed. He crawled across the pillow on which Blair’s head rested, and, snuggling close to his father, threw his chubby arms around Blair’s neck.
Hospital folk and the police are used to pathetic scenes in the hospital, but that sight seemed too much for them, and silently they stole from the ward and closed the door, leaving the wife to her grief, the husband to whatever thoughts he had, and the innocent babe to its joy.
It was a decidedly hard-luck story that the Blairs related to the detectives and nurses. The first year of their married life happiness and prosperity smiled on them, they said. But when the stork visited the Blair household in Dallas it brought not only a bright-eyed baby but also a nemesis.
Their savings went for doctor’s bills and clothing for the little one. Then Blair had difficulty, he says, in finding steady employment at his trade, painting. When they were reduced almost to poverty they decided to come to Los Angeles. They have been here six weeks. In that time, Blair says, he was unable to earn enough to provide properly for his sick wife and impoverished baby.
The last dollar the couple had went a few days ago for rent. Weary of tramping the streets in quest of work, weak from lack of nourishment, and worried because he couldn’t buy food, clothing and medicine, Blair says he conceived the idea of turning highwayman.
“Even then my nemesis followed me,” he said, choking. “I got a few dollars from the conductor and was hurrying home to give it to my wife for food and things when I was stopped by a police officer. I escaped from him and was climbing a fence when the bullet caught me in the leg.”
Blair will be confined in the criminal ward at the County Hospital until he is physically able to be arraigned. He will be charged with highway robbery, the police say.
* * * * *
FREE-FOR-ALL FIGHT
_New York World_
With whistle screeching and hundreds of passengers yelling for help out of the windows, a northbound Third avenue elevated train was held in panic late last night by a crowd of roughs, who terrorized the passengers and assaulted a conductor.
More than a dozen women, returning from the theatre, fainted, and Mrs. Sadie Arthur, of No. 991 East One Hundred and Seventy-eighth street, was thrown into violent hysterics and taken to the Lebanon Hospital.
The riot started at One Hundred and Thirty-eighth street and continued all the way to One Hundred and Sixty-sixth street. There policemen shoved through a great crowd, which had been attracted by the whistling, and arrested Adolph J. Weiss, eighteen years old, of No. 444 East One Hundred and Sixty-fifth street. His companions in the excitement managed to escape.
Weiss, who is somewhat of a fighter, was the ringleader of the disturbers. They began their horseplay by throwing hats about the car, smashing hats and jostling the passengers. Dresses were torn and women insulted; yet no one took a hand to suppress the outrage.
“Shame on you men,” cried some of the women. “Haven’t any of you enough spirit to protect us?”
Just as one woman received a severe blow in the face, Conductor Thomas J. Boyce, of No. 108 East One Hundred and Twenty-first street, who is known on the road as “Scrappy Tom,” jumped into the fracas and hit straight from the shoulder.
“Beat him up,” yelled the gang, and they all jumped on “Scrappy Tom.”
“Come on, all of you,” he roared, his fighting Irish blood aroused. One, two, three of the brawlers hit the dusty mat, and finally Boyce reached Adolph and landed hard on his jaw.
The fight ranged up and down the car, with Boyce taking care of the entire gang. Three or four women who had fainted and fallen to the floor were trampled upon.
Windows were raised throughout the train. Yells of “Murder!” “Police!” alarmed the Bronx. The motorman started his whistle going, and this tipped Policemen Wilson and Dempsey, of the Morrisania station, who lay in wait at One Hundred and Sixty-sixth street.
The crowd that was bunched there prevented their making more arrests and furnished a means of escape to Weiss’s “pals.”
Pieces of hats, feathers, ribbons and lingerie were scattered from end to end of the car. A number of the women had not revived, and Mrs. Arthur appeared to be in a critical condition. A hurry call was sent to Lebanon Hospital, and Dr. Singer, hastily treating the others, hurried Mrs. Arthur to the institution. He said she was in a dangerous hysterical condition.
The line was tied up for half an hour by the riot.
Weiss looked as though he had stayed in the ring twenty rounds with Bill Papke. His face was unrecognizable.
“I never knew that any of these conductors could fight,” he sputtered through swollen lips, as he was led to a cell.
“Over in the old country,” said “Scrappy Tom,” as he watched the ex-champion led to a cell in the Morrisania station, “I used to throw a couple of lads like you over my head before breakfast just for an appetizer.”
* * * * *
MURDER OF BUSINESS MAN
_New York Tribune_
Walter H. Hammond, a well known business man of Jersey City and a brother of Colonel Robert A. Hammond, was shot and instantly killed yesterday afternoon in the Pennsylvania Railroad Company’s ferry house at Jersey City. Peter Grew, a man he had befriended, was arrested as the slayer of Hammond.
Mr. Hammond was about to have his luncheon in the restaurant in the railway station, on the second floor. He had ascended the stairs and turned toward the restaurant, when he was confronted by Grew, to whom he made a cheery remark. Without a word in reply, the police say, Grew drew a revolver, which he carried in his coat pocket, and fired at him. The bullet entered the left temple and ploughed into the brain. Two more bullets were fired into his body after he fell.
Calmly replacing the weapon in his pocket, Grew started to walk down the stairs to the street, but Patrolman Amann, who was on duty at the ferry house, dashed up the stairs and, meeting him half way, arrested him. Grew remarked, Amann says, as he handed the revolver to the officer: “The thing is all over, and I might as well give up.” Later he persistently refused to admit that he did the shooting.
The police say their investigation has revealed that Grew, who has been regarded as eccentric and impulsive, had frequently threatened to kill Hammond. They say that Grew had recently been drinking excessively.
The victim of the shooting was the head of the Hammond and Wilson Stock Company, dealers in butterine and eggs at Jerome and 4th streets, Jersey City. He was a bachelor and forty-two years old. He was a director of the Second National Bank and of the Commercial Trust Company, and an active member of the Union League Club, of Jersey City. He lived at No. 314 Harrison avenue, Jersey City.
Grew had been in the same business. Some time ago, the police say, he was arrested in Brooklyn for making and selling oleomargarine without stamping it properly. Hammond gave him a new start in business. His business dwindled to nothing, and he accused Hammond of persecuting him. Grew owned a flathouse at No. 244 3d street, Jersey City, in which he, his wife and six children lived. This house he conveyed to his wife during his business troubles. It is said that Grew complained that his wife was under the influence of Mr. Hammond and refused to permit him to have any of the revenue derived from the rental of the building. Ten days ago he was arrested for beating her. Judge Harmon, before whom he was arraigned, ordered him committed to jail for ten days, but relented when he promised to refrain from abusing or beating his wife.
Otto S. Wilkins, of No. 21 Park street, who has a butter business at No. 52 Hudson street, Jersey City, met Grew less than an hour before the shooting. He told Captain Larkins, at the Jersey City Police Headquarters, of a conversation he had had with Grew. He said that Grew asked him to give him a job.
“I then told him,” Mr. Wilkins said, “that I understood that he was in such a financial condition that he could live without working. He said, ‘No,’ that his property brought him in $120 a month, and that after he had paid the interest on a small loan which stood against it, with taxes and repairs, it left very little to live on; that his wife would not let him have any of that, and that Mr. Hammond was responsible for her attitude in withholding funds from him. He was in a natural state of mind to-day, cool and collected, and talked to me in the same strain that I have always known him to use. He used to tell me four or five years ago that he had it in for Mr. Hammond and would shoot him some time.”
In a statement to the police Grew said he had known Hammond for sixteen years and had done business with him. “I am not going to answer that,” was his reply when asked if he had had any trouble with Hammond. He said that he was on his way home from Manhattan when he met Hammond, and that Hammond spoke to him, but he did not reply. “I had the revolver in my right hand in the inside pocket of my sack coat,” said Grew, “and that is all I have to say.” He stated that “Hammond had been pounding me and had got the inspectors to pound me.”
Mrs. Grew said that her husband’s mind had been affected by brooding over his failure in business, and she shared her husband’s opinion that he had been persecuted.
* * * * *
MURDER IN LITTLE ITALY
_Kansas City Star_
MURDERS IN LITTLE ITALY SINCE JANUARY 1.
January 9--Mario Ippolito shot down and killed by unidentified assassin.
January 11--John Kanato shot by John Herwetine; died two days later.
January 23--John Janoka shot by Nick Hontrogen; died same day.
January 24--Lusciano Musso murdered by gunmen in daylight.
February 4--Salvador Cangialosi shot and killed by Angelo Mannino.
February 24--Giovanni Seculo shot down by unidentified assassin, will die.
SHOOTINGS.
January 24--H. C. Petro, shot in his home, 110 Watkins Avenue, by someone who fired through the window; not fatal.
February 13--Robert Jordan, 1039 East Fourth Street, was shot twice by Tony Filo; not fatal.
That impenetrable air of mystery which closed down on the attack last night on two Italians, as it has closed down upon every one of the weekly murders of Little Italy, a sable cloak hiding details, obliterating the trails of assassins who shoot men in the back and flee, is not such a mysterious thing after all. There is only one policeman at night in Little Italy.
Giovanni Seculo and Tony Boni are walking along Cherry Street near Fourth Street. It is 10 o’clock at night. A shotgun barks, once, twice. Seculo falls, a death wound in his back. Boni falls, shot in the hip.
Presently a policeman comes, who was blocks distant at the time.
Little Italy shrugs and avers it was all sound asleep when Seculo and his companion were shot.
The assassin escapes.
There is nothing different in the main threads of the chronicle from those of all the other unpunished crimes of Little Italy.
Always, the crime is committed in some part of Little Italy distant from that lone policeman. Little Italy extends from Independence Avenue to the Missouri River, from Oak Street to Tracy Avenue.
“There should be at least four policemen in that district at night,” said Larry Ghent, chief of detectives, this morning. Then he revealed some figures on the police department.
In the district comprising Little Italy, Hick’s and Belvidere hollows, which are unsavory negro neighborhoods, and others almost as notorious, a district extending north of Independence Avenue and east of Main Street to Jackson Avenue, there are at night only four patrolmen.
In the central district, taking in the whole of the North Side, fourteen out of thirty-one police “beats” are without patrolmen at night.
In all Kansas City there are only 264 patrolmen, exclusive of officers. Many of these work as clerks in stations. The police force is at the lowest that it has been for years. The city is increasing in population.
Ghent withdrew detectives from other cases this morning and sent four of them, under the direction of Patrolman Louis Olivero, into Little Italy to attempt to ferret out the attack on Seculo last night.
Seculo, proprietor of the Neopolitan Macaroni factory at 516-18 East Tenth Street, and an influential Italian, probably will die. His condition was slightly improved today, however. Neither Seculo nor Boni knows why he was attacked or by whom.
* * * * *
MURDER
_New York Sun_
Trying door knobs early yesterday morning, Policeman Merkle of the East 104th street station found that the door of the little Italian grocery shop at 321 East 109th street opened. He entered, thinking that the place might have been robbed. At the rear of the dark, smelly little shop he found another door that opened, and as it did so, a bulldog sprang at him. The policeman shut the door and ran out to the street and rapped for assistance. Policeman O’Connell came and the two went back into the store.
They coaxed the dog into good humor, and, on lighting the gas in the squalid room, they found its master kneeling beside his bed in a pool of blood. Another door in the rear was forced open. Peter Mutolo, who lives there with his wife and three children, said they had heard no noise.
They said that the murdered man was Frederick Cinci, who had kept the shop about a month. He had been in this country about a year. No one knew of any enemies.
On the table were three dirty glasses and an empty wine bottle. Friends sometimes came to see him, the neighbors said. Nobody knew whether visitors came to see him before his death. On the floor below his body they found a stiletto, long of blade, which was bent double. In his neck, lungs, stomach and kidneys the ambulance surgeon found five thrusts.
The body was still warm; death hadn’t come long before the police found him. Some money, $1.60, was found in his pockets, and his gold watch had not been taken. Six dollars was found in the cash drawer of his shop. No one killed him to rob him of money. The dog, the police think, would have attacked a stranger and probably recognized the murderer.
* * * * *
MURDER
_New York World_
Pietro de Angelo ran along Columbus avenue, Montclair, N. J., yesterday. Plainly De Angelo, a sturdy fellow of twenty-two years, had run far and hard. He came from the direction of the Brookdale section of Bloomfield. He was leg weary, his steps grew shorter. Panting, he looked over his shoulder ever and again at an older man who ran behind him at some distance.
The older man carried a shotgun which swung by his side in his grasp as he plodded along. He seemed to be in no hurry; he seemed to be able to run forever; straight he ran, with his eyes fixed always on De Angelo, who looked back, fearfully.
Christopher street and Columbus avenue is the most fashionable part of Montclair. Wealthy persons live in that neighborhood. Men on the street or looking from their dwellings had no idea of the tragedy that was to be enacted. Being law-abiding, having no reason to run, in flight or pursuit, the Montclair men thought that De Angelo and the older man who ran behind him were both fleeing from the same pursuer.
“The police are after those fellows,” said one Montclair man.
“Or the game wardens,” said another. “See, the second chap has a shotgun--been poaching most likely. The young fellow has outstripped him.”
Not so. Where Christopher street intersects Columbus avenue De Angelo halted, swayed, almost fell. His bolt was shot, his breath was spent. He turned and slowly walked back to the older man, who did not even hasten his gait, but approached De Angelo--approached as inexorably as death itself. As he got nearer, De Angelo stretched out his hands toward him in mute pleading. The older man, never hurrying, never slackening his gait, got within ten yards of De Angelo, stopped, raised his shotgun to his shoulder, pulled the trigger, and sent the charge from one barrel into De Angelo’s left breast.
The younger man pitched down on his face, arms extended, palms down. The older man looked down at him an instant--yes, one barrel was enough--then, dropping the gun from his shoulder, he kept on running, no faster, no slower, than before.
And he escaped. A dozen most respectable citizens of Montclair all had the same thought, to notify the police. The dozen rushed to their telephones. When the police arrived De Angelo was dead. He had died instantly.
Deputy County Physician Muta went from Orange and had the body taken to the Morgue at Orange. De Angelo lived at No. 961 Wilson street, Montclair. His parents say he had dinner with them there at noon, then went out. They do not know where he went. The police are trying to learn.
* * * * *
MURDER
_Kansas City Star_
In the parlor of the rooming house at 57 Green Street A. C. Hobson was busily tuning the piano this morning. As he bent above the humming wires, the lid of the instrument thrown back, a light step sounded down the corridor. Then he heard a fresh young voice, singing softly. Hobson smiled and ceased his work to listen.
The voice sang a line or two touching on cows and green fields.
“A kid from the country,” Hobson said, and went on.
A heavier step clumped on the stairway leading up from the street entrance. The song ceased abruptly.
“Hello, Maggie,” Hobson heard a man’s voice say. “What made you leave me?”
There was a little pause; then a girl’s voice answered sharply:
“Why do you follow me, anyhow? I don’t love you.”
“I came to take you back with me,” said the man. Hobson had stopped his tinkering. The sound of the man’s heavy breathing came in to him through the open doorway from the dim corridor. “Kiss me,” the man’s voice commanded.
The girl’s voice rose. “No,” she cried. “No. I don’t love you.”
The man swore. “Then no one else’ll have you,” he shouted.
Hobson stood motionless, as though paralyzed. Then he heard a scuffle; the girl cried out sharply. The restraint on him was broken at that, and Hobson rushed into the corridor. The struggling forms of man and woman were disappearing through the doorway of another room down the hall. An instant or two later, Hobson heard the crack of a revolver shot followed closely by a second. Then the moans of a woman in agony succeeded. Hobson ran into the room. Man and woman writhed on the bed.
Going to a telephone, Hobson summoned the police. Sergt. James O’Rile, acting captain of the Walnut Street Police Station, responded. It was twenty-five minutes before the ambulance arrived.
The woman was Mrs. Maggie Towes, 24 years old, who left her husband, John Towes, in Homeville, Mo., four months ago. Towes came to Kansas City a week ago, finally, this morning, finding his wife at the rooming house of Mrs. Mary Howe, where she had found employment as housekeeper. Towes is a blacksmith’s helper and is 32 years old.
As he lay on the bed in that twilight state between the conscious and the unconscious, Towes reached a hand gropingly towards his wife.
“Kiss me, honey,” he mumbled; “kiss me before I go.”
They were taken to the General Hospital. Mrs. Towes was shot through the abdomen, Towes through the left breast. Both probably will die.
* * * * *
MURDER
_New York Sun_[A]
[A] Written by Frank Ward O’Malley.
Mrs. Catherine Sheehan stood in the darkened parlor of her home at 361 West Fifteenth street late yesterday afternoon, and told her version of the murder of her son Gene, the youthful policeman whom a thug named Billy Morley shot in the forehead, down under the Chatham Square elevated station early yesterday morning. Gene’s mother was thankful that her boy hadn’t killed Billy Morley before he died, “because,” she said, “I can say honestly, even now, that I’d rather have Gene’s dead body brought home to me, as it will be to-night, than to have him come to me and say, ‘Mother, I had to kill a man this morning.’
“God comfort the poor wretch that killed the boy,” the mother went on, “because he is more unhappy to-night than we are here. Maybe he was weak-minded through drink. He couldn’t have known Gene or he wouldn’t have killed him. Did they tell you at the Oak Street Station that the other policemen called Gene Happy Sheehan? Anything they told you about him is true, because no one would lie about him. He was always happy, and he was a fine-looking young man, and he always had to duck his helmet when he walked under the gas fixture in the hall, as he went out the door.
“He was doing dance steps on the floor of the basement, after his dinner yesterday noon for the girls--his sisters I mean--and he stopped of a sudden when he saw the clock and picked up his helmet. Out on the street he made pretence of arresting a little boy he knows, who was standing there--to see Gene come out, I suppose--and when the lad ran away laughing, I called out, ‘You couldn’t catch Willie, Gene; you’re getting fat.’
“‘Yes, and old, mammy,’ he said, him who is--who was--only twenty-six--‘so fat,’ he said, ‘that I’m getting a new dress coat that’ll make you proud when you see me in it, mammy.’ And he went over Fifteenth street whistling a tune and slapping his leg with a folded newspaper. And he hasn’t come back again.
“But I saw him once after that, thank God, before he was shot. It’s strange, isn’t it, that I hunted him up on his beat late yesterday afternoon for the first time in my life? I never go around where my children are working or studying--one I sent through college with what I earned at dressmaking, and some other little money I had, and he’s now a teacher; and the youngest I have at college now. I don’t mean that their father wouldn’t send them if he could, but he’s an invalid, although he’s got a position lately that isn’t too hard for him. I got Gene prepared for college, too, but he wanted to go right into an office in Wall street. I got him in there, but it was too quiet and tame for him, Lord have mercy on his soul; and then, two years ago, he wanted to go on the police force, and he went.
“After he went down the street yesterday I found a little book on a chair, a little list of the streets or something, that Gene had forgot. I knew how particular they are about such things, and I didn’t want the boy to get in trouble, and so I threw on a shawl and walked over through Chambers street toward the river to find him. He was standing on a corner some place down there near the bridge clapping time with his hands for a little newsy that was dancing; but he stopped clapping, struck, Gene did, when he saw me. He laughed when I handed him the little book and told that was why I’d searched for him, patting me on the shoulder when he laughed--patting me on the shoulder.
“‘It’s a bad place for you here, Gene,’ I said. ‘Then it must be bad for you, too, mammy,’ said he; and as he walked to the end of his beat with me--it was dark then--he said, ‘There are lots of crooks here, mother, and they know and hate me and they’re afraid of me’--proud, he said it--‘but maybe they’ll get me some night.’ He patted me on the back and turned and walked east toward his death. Wasn’t it strange that Gene said that?
“You know how he was killed, of course, and how-- Now let me talk about it, children, if I want to. I promised you, didn’t I, that I wouldn’t cry any more or carry on? Well, it was five o’clock this morning when a boy rang the bell here at the house and I looked out the window and said, ‘Is Gene dead?’ ‘No, ma’am,’ answered the lad, ‘but they told me to tell you he was hurt in a fire and is in the hospital.’ Jerry, my other boy, had opened the door for the lad and was talking to him while I dressed a bit. And then I walked down stairs and saw Jerry standing silent under the gaslight, and I said again, ‘Jerry, is Gene dead?’ And he said ‘Yes,’ and he went out.
“After a while I went down to the Oak Street Station myself, because I couldn’t wait for Jerry to come back. The policemen all stopped talking when I came in, and then one of them told me it was against the rules to show me Gene at that time. But I knew the policeman only thought I’d break down, but I promised him I wouldn’t carry on, and he took me into a room to let me see Gene. It was Gene.
“I know to-day how they killed him. The poor boy that shot him was standing in Chatham Square arguing with another man when Gene told him to move on. When the young man wouldn’t, but only answered back, Gene shoved him, and the young man pulled a revolver and shot Gene in the face, and he died before Father Rafferty, of St. James’s, got to him. God rest his soul. A lot of policemen heard the shot and they all came running with their pistols and clubs in their hands. Policeman Laux--I’ll never forget his name or any of the others that ran to help Gene--came down the Bowery and ran out into the middle of the square where Gene lay.
“When the man that shot Gene saw the policemen coming, he crouched down and shot at Policeman Laux, but, thank God, he missed him. Then policemen named Harrington and Rouke and Moran and Kehoe chased the man all around the streets there, some heading him off when he tried to run into that street that goes off at an angle--East Broadway, is it?--a big crowd had come out of Chinatown now and was chasing the man, too, until Policemen Rouke and Kehoe got him backed up against a wall. When Policeman Kehoe came up close, the man shot his pistol right at Kehoe and the bullet grazed Kehoe’s helmet.
“All the policemen jumped at the man then, and one of them knocked the pistol out of his hand with a blow of a club. They beat him, this Billy Morley, so Jerry says his name is, but they had to because he fought so hard. They told me this evening that it will go hard with the unfortunate murderer, because Jerry says that when a man named Frank O’Hare, who was arrested this evening charged with stealing cloth or something, was being taken into headquarters, he told Detective Gegan that he and a one-armed man who answered to the description of Morley, the young man who killed Gene, had a drink last night in a saloon at Twenty-second street and Avenue A and that when the one-armed man was leaving the saloon he turned and said, ‘Boys, I’m going out now to bang a guy with buttons.’
“They haven’t brought me Gene’s body yet. Coroner Shrady, so my Jerry says, held Billy Morley, the murderer, without letting him get out on bail, and I suppose that in a case like this they have to do a lot of things before they can let me have the body here. If Gene only hadn’t died before Father Rafferty got to him, I’d be happier. He didn’t need to make his confession, you know, but it would have been better, wouldn’t it? He wasn’t bad, and he went to mass on Sunday without being told; and even in Lent, when we always say the rosary out loud in the dining-room every night, Gene himself said to me the day after Ash Wednesday, ‘If you want to say the rosary at noon, mammy, before I go out, instead of at night when I can’t be here, we’ll do it.’
“God will see that Gene’s happy tonight, won’t he, after Gene said that?” the mother asked as she walked out into the hallway with her black-robed daughters grouped behind her. “I know he will,” she said, “and I’ll--” She stopped with an arm resting on the banister to support her. “I--I know I promised you, girls,” said Gene’s mother, “that I’d try not to cry any more, but I can’t help it.” And she turned toward the wall and covered her face with her apron.
* * * * *
MURDER
_Kansas City Star_
A boy of 19, carefree, enamored of the life of the road, ran away from a good home in Elm Grove, Kas., on a sunny day last March.
Down in the wilds of Northern Arkansas, riding in a freight car, one day in the middle of March, a brakeman came upon him and they fought--the brakeman angered at the lad, the boy hot with the lust of youth that welcomes a fray.
The boy, Charles Hyde, hit the brakeman on the head with a bolt. The brakeman went down, like a shot thing, and fell from the car under the flying wheels, which ground him to death.
Then the boy went on. Later he heard a coroner’s jury had reached a verdict of “accidental death.”
Then began the flight. It was flight--not from the far-reaching arm of the law; for the verdict of the backwoods jury had placed no suspicion on any man. But it was flight from a dread thing that haunted him, making his nights of no comfort and his days of dark despair.
Conscience, men call it, and Retribution. But by whatever name, under whatever guise, the dread thing caught the boy at last, caught and enfolded him. And the lad who had been carefree a few short months ago, now a trembling, quaking, white-faced wreck, stumbled into the Mulberry Street police station, down in the West Bottoms yesterday--and surrendered.
“I killed a man,” he said. “I killed a man when I didn’t have any idea of doing it. And he’s been after me. I’ve got to give myself up; I’ve got to confess. It’s the only way I can get rid of it.”
They heard the boy out, those policemen in the bottoms, not understanding, sensing only dimly the fear that was on him. Then they took him to police headquarters and wired to the authorities in Arkansas.
“Last night wasn’t so bad,” said Hyde at police headquarters this morning. “It wasn’t so bad, now that I have given myself up. That’s made me feel better. But all the other nights since it happened have been hell. We’d be fighting in the car again, with the wheels clicking away underneath us, him hot and gettin’ the best of me. Then I’d stumble against something and pick it up and feel it in my hands, and know he was mine.
“My God!” said Charles Hyde, helpless toy of fate, entrapped in the coils of a retributive nemesis. “My God!” And he covered his gaunt boy’s face with shaking hands.
Back and forth, up and down, across the harvest lands of the Middle West, went Hyde, riding in freight cars, clinging to the rods of trans-continentals, always seeking to escape from the thing that pursued him--and always failing. In the hot fields, laboring with his hands, staggering in the heat of the day but pressing on, he found no surcease. And then, despite his efforts, hard work brought no sleep at night. And he was alone with his fear.
“I know the law’s got me,” he cried. “I know it can hang me or put me in prison. But I had to do it. I had to give myself up.
“And to think I never meant to kill him, only to lay him out and make him let me alone!”
Then Charles Hyde cried, not the tears of blessed relief, but the scalding tears of those who must stand helpless and non-understanding before grim-countenanced Fate.
* * * * *
A WAYWARD GIRL
_Chicago Herald_
They called her Mandy on the farm and they made much of her.
She was the only daughter the Noyers had and nothing was too good for her. So “dad” said--and mother agreed.
Mandy didn’t realize how happy she was. She was ambitious and wished to see the city. She had an aunt in Chicago, Mrs. H. Bole, of 1856 Dolphin street. Why couldn’t she go to Chicago, study stenography and live with auntie?
Her parents didn’t like to have her go, but she insisted. So they kissed her and sent her away.
She went to the Weston School at 175 North Wabash avenue for some time--and then, last June, she had a quarrel with her aunt and went to live at 1809 West Wilson street.
She made the acquaintance of Thomas Hazen of 4009 Jackson boulevard and Mandy quit the school. Only she wasn’t Mandy any more. Her name was Thelma Beyers.
Hazen and the girl, who is only 16 years old, were arrested by Detective Sergeant George E. McCormick and Mandy wept and told her story.
It had been a gay life, she said, fascinating and swift.
But if mother and “dad” down in Siddon, Ill., will forgive her she will go home and stay there for good.
But Mandy is needed as a witness against Hazen and five other young men for whom warrants were obtained yesterday.
And she will have to appear against the proprietors of the Congress Café, Charley West’s, the Café De Luxe, the Delaware, and eight or ten other cafés which sold her gin fizzes, highballs and other drinks; and against the owners and proprietors of eight or ten hotels that admitted her--a girl just out of short skirts--without asking questions.
Then there is a woman of a good family on the West Side who will be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
So it will be a long time before Mandy can go home.
* * * * *
VIOLATION OF MANN ACT
_Kansas City Star_
Michael O’Rourke loved his wife and his two little daughters and their little home. That was in Airdale eight years ago.
Then one day Michael discovered something that broke him up completely. His little girls’ mother was not the kind of woman he had believed her to be. It cost Michael more than outsiders could realize, but he got a divorce. The court gave him the custody of his daughters, Rosie and Maggie.
He brought them to Kansas City in an effort to forget--and to get away from their mother. He put them in St. Joseph’s Orphan Home, Thirty-first and Jefferson streets, and went to work there himself as coachman.
But the mother did not stay in Airdale. She followed her children here and tried to take them away from the home. Several times she tried it, but the watch kept on the little girls was too close and she did not succeed. At last, Michael, fearing that sooner or later he would lose them, gave up his job and took the girls away. Rosie, the elder, did not want to go. Even in those days she was attached to her mother.
Michael took Rosie and Maggie to Seattle, where he put them in a convent. Most of his earnings went to pay for keeping them there. After a year or two he joined the navy and intrusted to Uncle Sam the payments for their education from his wages as a sailor.
The long voyages kept him from seeing them more than once or twice a year and he fancied they were forgetting him. That, and the difficulty of providing for them on what he was earning, made him desperate. He deserted the navy. He took his daughters from the convent and made a home for them.
One day when he was away at work a veiled woman drove up to the cottage in a motor car.
“Why, it’s mamma!” exclaimed Rosie, and rushed to greet her.
When the woman drove away, the girls and their belongings went with her. Michael came home that night to an empty house.
He found them in Airdale--in their mother’s house, where the blinds were drawn all day long. He started habeas corpus proceedings and got back the younger girl, then 15 years old. Rosie had become 18 in the meantime and refused to leave her mother.
Michael took Maggie to St. Louis and put her in a convent there. Up to this time the government officials had not troubled him and he had almost forgotten that his desertion was still hanging over him. But someone told, and Michael was arrested. He was convicted and taken to the naval prison in New Hampshire.
A short time later a woman in a motor car stole Maggie from the convent. This time there was no one to follow them.
Yesterday in Airdale a house was raided by government officers. Rosie and Maggie were found there. Their mother, who is known now as Mrs. Pearl Perkins, was arrested. She was charged with transporting Rosie from Seattle in violation of the Mann Act. She will be arraigned before the United States commissioner in Springfield today.
Rosie has gone far on the path her mother led her. Maggie was rescued from the same life in the nick of time.
Michael, in his cell, can only wonder what has become of them.
* * * * *
CAPTURE OF ESCAPED CONVICT
_Chicago Inter Ocean_
Every evening at 5:33 a fast train whizzes through the mining town of Denville, Ill., favoring the little, box-like station with a derisive flirt of its tail car as it takes a curve. Every evening at 5:30, except when infrequent duties interfere, it is the custom of the village constable of Denville to saunter up to the “deepo” and solemnly watch the flyer pass. Once, they say, a pretty girl waved to him from a Pullman window.
George Brown, station agent at Denville, knows the constable’s time as well as that of the train. When he thought it was getting pretty near the hour for the appearance of constable and flyer yesterday afternoon, he looked at his watch. It was 5:20 o’clock.
The station agent was particularly anxious to see the constable, for he had real news to relate. A short time before, answering a ring at the station telephone, he had been informed by the deputy warden at Joliet penitentiary that Matthew Starn, a life convict, with two coldblooded murders to his discredit, had escaped from the prison and was believed to be headed in the direction of Denville.
“He’s a cool hand and a mighty desperate man,” warned the warden. “Don’t take any chances with him if you see him.”
A few minutes later, while Brown was straining his ears for the distant sound of the flyer’s whistle and his eyes for a glimpse of the constable, a man wearing an ill-fitting, rough, all-enveloping garment of blue and a blue cap of the same material, walked into the station.
“When is the next train to St. Louis?” he asked, his eyes boring into Brown’s.
The station agent had instantly recognized the odd garb of the man before him as the Joliet uniform. He fought to keep his tone even and casual as he replied:
“Can’t get out tonight.”
Brown turned away, pretending to consult a time card hung behind the wicket. Really he was looking out the window, hoping to see the familiar form of the constable.
“Well, ain’t you curious about me?” demanded his visitor. “How do you think I got here?”
“Beat a freight, I suppose,” Brown hastily guessed. “That’s against the rules, but I always have a lot of sympathy for a man like you. What’s your trouble?”
“Broke!” said his visitor, tersely. “I ain’t had nothing but hard luck these last five years.”
In the distance the whistle of the flyer tooted. The man in blue eyed a stack of bills in the open cash drawer.
“I don’t know whether to beat it or to--to visit a while with you,” he murmured, glancing at the station door, and then back again at the cash drawer.
Brown consulted the time card again--and looked out the window, inwardly breathing a prayer. Sure enough, there was the constable, trudging down the road toward the station, a bit behind schedule but not speeding to make up lost time.
“I guess you--you’d better--stay!” said the agent.
Brown went through a few tense moments after that remark, that he said later he wouldn’t experience again “if they made me president of the road.”
The constable took up his stand, not on the station platform, as usual, but a couple of hundred feet away. Stolidly he watched the flyer pass, then looked undecidedly toward the station. He seemed to be debating whether or not to forego his routine visit with the agent. Twice he turned his back and started away, only to halt, wheel and resume his meditation. A Niagara of sweat coursed down Brown’s cheeks as he waited. The man in blue was standing close to the wicket, still peering into the drawer. His right hand was in his hip pocket.
Brown dared direct his gaze out the window no longer. He stood silently watching his blue-clad visitor, waiting to see what would be in his hand when it came from the bulging hip pocket.
Then the station door opened. In it stood the constable. He took in the significance of the blue figure as Brown’s sinister visitor wheeled, and the Denville police revolver, rusty with age, but loaded, flashed from his pocket.
“Hands up!” remarked the constable.
Ten minutes later Matthew Starn, escaped “lifer,” who had worsted the restraining walls of Joliet, was held securely a prisoner in the amateurish village calaboose.
Starn, who is 26, shot and killed two Joliet business men, who had the misfortune to resist him when he robbed their stores. The “five years of hard luck” had been spent in prison, where, despite his criminal record, he became a “trusty” through good conduct in the penitentiary. At 7:30 o’clock yesterday morning he was given a message to deliver outside the prison walls. When he did not return within an hour two posses of guards, deputies and policemen started on his trail and word was flashed through the surrounding territory. Denville is about twenty miles southeast of Joliet.
* * * * *
STORY OF ESCAPED CONVICT
_Chicago News_[B]
[B] By Ben Hecht.
Lockup Keeper O’Malley brought him out of the cell in the detective bureau and he stood in the sun, blinking--a little man with brown eyes and a sober, deadly sober face.
“A fella wants to see you, George O’Brien,” said Lockup Keeper O’Malley, and left the little man, an escaped “lifer” from Joliet, standing against the cell wall and blinking. The sun that came through the dirty basement window fell full on his face and he stood staring into it, twisting his felt hat in his hands.
“They’ll take me back in the morning,” said the little man, as if he were talking to himself, as if he were repeating something he had sat up all night in his cell thinking about. “And I won’t see her. I want to explain to her. Good God.”
It was a prayer. The little man’s throat trembled, the muscles of his face quivered and his eyes glistened in the sun.
Four days ago the little man was married, after three months of liberty. Fourteen years lay behind him when he walked away from the honor farm at Joliet. He told the story himself, the whole story without any omissions. But first he said again:
“I don’t care so much about going back; I’m used to the life down there. But they’ll put me in solitary, with a ball and chain on my feet, and I won’t be able to see her for six months--if I don’t see her before they take me back.”
Tears came now and rolled over the drawn face of the little man and his voice was so low that the listener had to bend down to hear.
“She didn’t know about my being an escaped lifer,” he went on. “I couldn’t tell her. I was afraid. She was the first woman who smiled at me after fourteen years--when I got my job--and she was like an angel to me.
“I want to see her and tell her--so’s to let her know all about it. I’ll tell it to you, and, if I don’t see her, print it in your paper just as I say--so’s she can know.”
The little man seized his listener’s hand. He couldn’t talk, but he clung to the hand until his voice cleared, and then he said: “So she’ll know I was trying to live straight--so she’ll not think I was all wrong.”
So here’s your husband’s story, Mrs. O’Brien, the story he never told you because you seemed like an angel to him and he was afraid of losing you. They’ll tie ball and chain on his feet and seat him in a cell for six months and then they’ll take the ball and chain off and let him live inside the walls the rest of his life. Never mind that. He said he didn’t care if he could only get this story to you, so that you wouldn’t think rotten of him, Mrs. O’Brien.
“If I could only see her for a minute,” he murmured, and then he went on as he had promised.
“I was a kid,” he said, “about 17, and I had a good home. But I fell in with a lot of fellows who weren’t any good. And one of them--Larsen--planned to hold up somebody. He got me to get a gun for him and we both went out. The gun was half cocked and it went off in the holdup and the man was killed. I was standing away at the time. I was a kid. They sent us both up for life. That was in 1901. And I lived in the prison until July. D’ye understand? Every day was the same, every night was the same, and I lived in the prison for fourteen years. D’ye understand? And they made me an honor convict.”
The little man laughed.
“I saw fellas come for worse things than I’d done--regular criminals--and get out, pardoned. And they’d come back again--and get out. And I lived in the prison. Fourteen years. All the time I was young. Every day was the same. And I dreamed of gettin’ out. But they wouldn’t pardon me. I never knew any politicians. I was only a kid when they sent me up.
“And every night was the same. Good God. I wanted to get out. I wanted to live. I knew I was straight. There was nothing wrong with me. I was only a kid when it happened. And I learned in the prison. It was fourteen years.”
The little man’s face was shaking and his hands trembled as if they were on fine springs.
“So one day I walked out. I was an honor convict. I broke my pledge. But I knew, I knew I could be straight. And I wanted to live. Every day was the same down there. Tell her that,” said the little man. “You can write it better’n I can talk it. But get it to her--I was only a kid when they sent me up--and every day was the same and I wanted to live. Then I got out. I went to Lakeside and boarded. My brother knew, but didn’t tell. He gave me a chance. I got a job. They didn’t ask me for references. It was with the American Motor Machine Company. The fella looked at me and hired me. I worked. They raised my pay after I’d been there a month. I was livin’ straight.
“And then I met Sarah Wilson. She worked in the office. I used to dream of women--of some one like her--and she liked me, even though I am a little fella. Aw say, she was an angel. If I could only see her for a minute--to tell her.”
The little man was shaking all over.
“We got married four days ago,” he went on, “and I had it all planned. Nobody was goin’ to know about me bein’ a lifer. I was goin’ to forget it myself. Say, I was happy.”
A rare smile came into the little man’s face.
“Say, I had a home--a home.”
The smile changed and he laughed in a peculiar way. He laughed until Lockup Keeper O’Malley looked up and said: “Cut it out!” And then he went on talking.
“I had it all planned--every bit. I was a good worker, had a job in the stockroom. I was going to live with her. Last night she called me out of the kitchen. I was fixing the sink. I came out all smiling. I liked company and she said there was someone to see me.
“I came out. God. I’ll never forget. I came out in my slippers--say, they were waitin’ at the door, six of them. And they took me away. They didn’t let me talk to her. They took me away and I won’t see her again--if she don’t hurry up and come. They’ll take me down this morning. But I don’t care if you’ll print this story--say, I don’t care. I’m used to it. Only get it over to her--God--and I’ll pray for you.”
“George O’Brien!” called a voice down the stairway. “He’s here,” said Lockup Keeper O’Malley. Two men, one of them the parole agent, came walking down the steps. “They’re takin’ me back,” whispered the little man. The two men walked over to him. One of them dangled a pair of handcuffs.
* * * * *
SUICIDE OR ACCIDENT
_New York Mail_
With gas pouring from an open jet in a bathroom adjoining his sleeping room, Frederick H. Herman, the indicted ex-president of the Universal Reserve Life Insurance Company, was found dead in his bed to-day at his home, 851 East Seventy-eighth street.
He drew his last breath just as his family entered the room.
Members of Mr. Herman’s family scouted the theory of suicide, declaring that his death was purely the result of an accident. The police reported the case as a “supposed suicide from gas poisoning.”
Coroner Acritelli, after making an examination of Mr. Herman’s room, said that death undoubtedly had been due to accidental gas asphyxiation.
The coroner said that his physician, Dr. Weston, would make an examination of the body this afternoon, and that an inquest would be held later this week.
Dr. Ralph Wilson, of 836 Madison avenue, who was summoned immediately, declared that the gas in the room was not enough to have caused death alone, and that Mr. Herman had died from a combination of heart trouble and gas inhalation.
Mr. Herman, said Dr. Wilson, also had been a sufferer from diabetes, and in his weakened condition was not so able to resist the influence of the gas as a man in normal health.
The discovery was made by Mrs. Herman at 5.30 a. m. She slept in a room alongside that of her husband. On awaking she smelled gas and went to Mr. Herman’s room to investigate.
Adjoining the bedroom is a bathroom, the door of which was open. The gas was coming from that room.
Mrs. Herman hurriedly summoned the butler, who went into the bathroom and found that the valve of a pipe leading to a small gas heater was open. This he shut off.
Dr. Wilson was telephoned for, but before he arrived Mr. Herman was dead. Two or three minutes after Mrs. Herman entered her husband’s room his son, Frederick R., went there in response to his mother’s call. He found his father propped up in his bed just breathing. At the elder Herman’s side lay an opened magazine and his eyeglasses.
Windows were thrown open and an attempt made to revive Mr. Herman but it was unsuccessful.
The gas was carried to the heater by a pipe that led from the wall. There were two valves on the pipe, one near the wall and the other near the heater.
The family declares that the lower valve had been turned off, but that the one at the wall was on full and in some way the gas had succeeded in escaping.
John L. O’Brien, the personal counsel for Frederick H. Herman, was notified of his client’s death and arrived at the house shortly after. Mr. O’Brien saw reporters who called at the house, explaining that members of the family did not care to be interviewed.
Mr. O’Brien denied that Mr. Herman committed suicide. He said that the circumstances surrounding his death made it appear that it had been accidental.
“Mr. Herman’s death was purely accidental; of that I am convinced,” said Mr. O’Brien. “He was not worried by the civil litigation in which he was engaged with the receivers of the Universal Reserve Life Insurance Company, and he long ago became satisfied that he would never be brought to trial for the criminal indictment that was hanging over his head in connection with the alleged misuse of money to influence legislation at Albany.
“If it had been Mr. Herman’s plan to take his life by gas he would have gone about it differently. The gas in his own room was turned off, and it is reasonable to assume that if he had had suicide in mind he would have turned on the gas in his room.
“He was fully twenty feet away from the gas heater in the bathroom and there was a constant current of air flowing between the two rooms.
“There was some trouble with the furnace, and Mr. Herman, who likes his room warm, had turned on the gas in the bathroom. Air was coming from the open furnace register.
“It is evident that Mr. Herman had been reading, had gone into the bathroom and turned off the valve near the heater, had then returned to bed, read a while, and finally turned out his own gas.
“He went to bed at 11.30, and must have remained up reading through the night.
“I had never seen Mr Herman more optimistic than he was in the last few weeks. He had been busily engaged with me in preparing for litigation in connection with the Universal Reserve Company affairs. He had no financial troubles that I know of. His family life was most peaceful and happy.”
Mr. Herman’s bedroom was on the second floor, directly over the parlor. Other members of his family slept on the same floor and the servants on the floor above.
Mr. Herman’s son, Frederick R., his daughter-in-law, Ethel, and the latter’s mother, Mrs. William Wilson of 961 Columbia Avenue, Worcester, Mass., were in the house. Mrs. Wilson had come to New York to spend the holidays with her daughter and son-in-law.
Dr. Wilson, on being questioned by reporters, said:
“The case appeared to be purely accidental. The gas was escaping from the stove, and from all appearances, after Mr. Herman had turned off the gas, he accidentally turned it on again. Mr. Herman had a weak heart, and the gas undoubtedly affected him more quickly than it would a person with a stronger heart.”
Dr. Wilson said that shortly before 6 a. m. he called up the coroner’s office to report the death, and a clerk there told him to notify the police. This was done, according to the physician, and a policeman from the East Sixty-seventh street station arrived at the house.
An ambulance was also sent to the residence, although, according to Dr. Wilson, he had told the police that he was a physician and that Mr. Herman had been dead for some time.
* * * * *
NOTE.--_The different points of view from which the same facts may be told in news stories are very well shown in the two following examples._
SUICIDE
(1)
_New York World_
Facing starvation, Victor Schwartz and his wife, Louise, a respectable old Swiss couple, committed suicide yesterday by inhaling illuminating gas in their rooms back of a small confectionery and stationery store, which they carried on at No. 85 Arnold street, Williamsburg.
Each was sixty-seven years old. They had made careful preparations for their deaths. Every hole and crevice in their sparsely furnished rooms had been plugged with paper and rags, and in several places tacks had been driven into the woodwork to make sure that neither the rags nor paper would become dislodged. It was this hammering on Sunday night which caused neighbors to wonder what the old couple were doing, as they always retired before 10 o’clock.
When the Schwartzes rented the store and two rooms back of it eight months ago for $12 a month, they told neighbors that three years before their only child, a daughter of thirty-one years, had died. They said they had never recovered from the shock.
Business during the summer had been very poor, and of late Schwartz and his wife had a hard struggle to get along. The woman frequently told neighbors that she believed their misfortune would soon end. On Sunday evening Schwartz and his wife distributed much of their stock in the store to the children in the neighborhood. It is evident that they had decided on suicide.
Mrs. Rose Black, who has a grocery adjoining the Schwartz store, and Mrs. Kate Weck, a second floor tenant, heard the couple hammering in their rooms up to midnight Sunday, and yesterday at daybreak the two women were the first to detect the odor of illuminating gas from the Schwartz apartments. Policeman McCaffrey, of the Hamburg avenue station, was called in and, forcing an entrance, found Schwartz sitting dead in a chair in the kitchen, fully dressed. He had one end of a rubber tube in his mouth, the other end of which was fixed to an open gas burner. The woman lay dead on her bed in a night dress with a rubber tube in her mouth, fastened to another open gas burner. Ambulance Surgeon Sibbel, who came from the German Hospital, said the couple had been dead several hours. On a small card was a request that Edward Black be telephoned for at “421 Thirty-eighth street.” A dime lay on the card to pay for the telephone message. In the room was found 67 cents. The bodies were removed to the Brooklyn Morgue.
(2)
_New York Times_
“Auntie Schwartz” was the way in which Mrs. Louise Schwartz soon came to be known to the children of the neighborhood when she and her husband, Victor, each of them 67 years old, opened a small candy and stationery store at 85 Arnold Street, Williamsburg, about eight months ago.
Her small customers just kept the business going in the little shop, but it was a penny business, and when the rent of the store was raised recently from $12 to $15 a month, “Auntie” Schwartz almost despaired of continuing to make a living. Her face grew sad and careworn, and one day, when one of her little customers was grieving over the loss of a pet doll which a dog had chewed up, “Auntie” Schwartz did not console her with a cheerful word and a chocolate drop or two, as she was wont to do. Instead she took her on her lap and told of the little girl she had lost three years ago. She did not explain that her “little girl” had been 31 years old, and that she had helped greatly in making a living for the old folks, who were now staggering under the burden of age, increased rent, and a precarious trade. The old people seemed always oppressed by the sadness of the loss of their only child.
Day by day recently the children noticed that “Auntie” Schwartz was less cheerful that usual. Their elders seldom visited the little store, and so none who might have helped knew that old Victor Schwartz and his wife were almost starving to death, or that the old couple were slowly making up their minds to end their troubles together.
So it was that the children were the first to discover yesterday that the little store was not open for business when they passed it on their way to their first day at school, and “Auntie” Schwartz lost many pennies which her small customers had intended to expend for lead pencils and erasers. “Auntie” Schwartz had called them all in on Sunday evening and had distributed among them all her small stock of candy, telling them that she would have a full new stock for the beginning of school.
Meantime, Mrs. Kate Weck and Mrs. Rose Black, who live above the store, were puzzled by the odor of gas which permeated their apartments. At last the women traced it to the store, which they found closed and locked. The gas came from the two living rooms which the Schwartzes occupied behind their store, and Mrs. Weck and Mrs. Black finally got Policeman McCaffrey of the Hamburg Avenue Station to smash down the door.
The policeman and the women found the old man seated in a chair in the kitchen, a gas tube clutched between his teeth, the other end of which was made fast to a gas jet. He was dead. In the little bedroom they found also the body of Mrs. Schwartz dead like her husband from the gas which she had inhaled. Like him, too, she had tied the tube around her head, so that it should not slip from her mouth.
A search of the rooms showed that the old couple had been in the most abject poverty. Only 67 cents was found in the flat.
* * * * *
SUICIDE
_Milwaukee Sentinel_
CHICAGO, Ill., March 3.--Emma Johnson died on Monday. She was the grave faced little seamstress from La Crosse, Wis., who used to sit every day near a dingy window at 42 Wilson avenue, plying her needle in silence, wearing an expression like that of a nun. And every one said she “looked so peaceful.”
But the coroner’s jury found that the little woman, in whom no one would have suspected deep emotion, had been tempestuously in love, that she had not been able to win the man she wanted, and that she had sat there at her seams, “praying for strength to wait for a natural death.” She did not want to kill herself. But she did.
She went to the home of Mrs. Jennie Nelson, 4212 North avenue. Mrs. Nelson’s brother, William Larson, is the man she wanted to marry. He “was fond of her, too,” as Mrs. Nelson said, “but his health was poor and he did not want to marry for the present.”
Emma Johnson turned on the gas and died. She left a letter, in which she said:
“Dearest Friends--When you have read this I have crossed the bar. Ambition, energy and strength have deserted me and every hope and dream is shattered. Death is the only relief. I have called upon heaven to save me from myself--to send me a natural death. I don’t want to die like this. I want to live and be happy, but that is not to be.
“I’ve had my hell here, but it is hard to go like this, hard to bring this sorrow upon my folks, bitterly hard.
“For the one who has driven me to do this I feel only love, and if I am permitted to enter heaven I shall wait for him.
“Perhaps he will love me then; he will feel bad about this, but help him understand that I forgive all, and I hope some one else will be to him what I never could, a joy and a comfort, and that she may make him happy as I had hoped to do. I wish I could look upon the faces of my dear father and brothers and sisters again. I can’t still the voice in my heart. I haven’t the strength. Forgive me and pray for me. Only another lost soul.”
* * * * *
SUICIDE OF SCHOOL GIRL
_Chicago Tribune_
Rose Lubin’s younger brother, Max, wanted help with his “home work” last night. Rose, who is 16, is proud of her standing at the head of the eighth grade in the Winfield school.
“I can’t do my own work and yours, too,” she told Max. “I’ve got enough to keep me busy till bed time and I’m not going to lose my marks on your account.”
Max went to his father and the father went to Rose.
“If you don’t help your brother I’ll take you out of school,” said Lubin.
Whereupon Rose changed her mind about the manner in which the nickel she had earned in the afternoon was to be spent. She bought acid with it, returned to her home at 951 West Fifteenth street, and drank the poison.
Rose will not be at school today. Perhaps she will never go back. She is in the county hospital. Physicians there fear she will not recover.
* * * * *
CAUSE OF ATTEMPTED SUICIDE
_New York Evening Post_
Mary Stober, eighteen years old, of 951 East 135th Street, who tried to kill herself last week (Friday) because she has no piano, is home again from the Lincoln Hospital, and is starting in to live again in a world where no hope is, since she cannot have a piano.
To dream every night that you have a piano and “play just grand,” and then wake up to hear the alarm clock buzzing six o’clock; to forget where you are, and half close your eyes and pretend that the movements your fingers are making are on a piano, instead of having something to do with the bobbin of a machine in an embroidery factory; to hear beautiful music suddenly in the midst of your work, and listen, startled and ecstatic, for a moment until it is lost in the endless whirring of the machines--these things, if you have never done them, may seem a certainty that Life is, after all, very splendid while there is such a thing as imagination, and that the gray of it is woven full of unexpected and vivid threads of color.
Or it may impress you as deliciously funny that the lack of a piano can seem tragic, if you have a big enough view of tragic things to see that some of them are greater. But to this girl, who does them every day and night of her life, they are simply the things which have twice made her try to kill herself, the reason why she is “disgusted, always disgusted,” as she says, very simply.
Mary Stober has a pale, strong face, with a stubborn chin and a wistful smile, very gray eyes, light brown hair in a bang on her forehead, and very red lips. She looks very young and very determined and very wistful and somewhat sullen. Her hands are red and rough and square-fingered from hard work.
She was dusting one of the rooms this morning in the soggy apartment house of which her mother is janitress, and where they and the six other children live and pay half-rent. She goes back to the factory on Monday. She sat down in one of the innumerous chairs to tell her story, fingering the grimy dust-cloth with her red fingers, which are never quiet for a minute. Her mother stood up through the recital--the little German mother who speaks English only brokenly, who wears a little shawl over her head while she sweeps down the long flights of stairs and who used to play the piano herself when she was a girl in Germany--and looked at Mary with a worried, gentle, almost heartbroken look.
“When I was ten--that was when I stopped school and went to work--I thought always about when I would be eighteen and a grand piano player,” Mary began, fingering the dust-cloth. “Then I was eighteen and I didn’t have a piano yet, and I was almost crazy. Eight years I have worked, and I haven’t got anything yet. And what’s worrying me now is where we’re going to go. We can’t stay here. Other places we’ve been we’ve had coal and things, and our money could all go for the food and clothes. But now we’ve got to pay for a stove and coal.”
She and her sister, who is nineteen and who can play the piano by ear when she can find one to play--Mary herself can only play with one hand by ear, and “people don’t like to hear that kind o’ playing,” she says--and the oldest brother, are the only ones who make money. Mary makes seven dollars a week. All of these details, which she tells simply, go to show that there is little hope for a piano. The little, crumpled mother from behind the chair she is leaning on says, in her broken way, that a piano is not so easy to get, and looks hopelessly at her daughter.
“Then we got phonograph, but she only cry every time he play,” the mother said.
“I can’t bear to hear it,” interrupted Mary. “I’d rather play myself.”
And so finally the brother took the phonograph away, about a month ago, since it only made the girl more miserable than ever.
“And in every house I go to,” she said, “there is a piano. And one girl comes to the factory, saying she can play grand, and her father wants her to play in a cabaret. She’s only sixteen, too. I can’t be happy,” she finished simply. “I can’t be happy. And it gets my goat when anybody laughs. And every single night I dream I’ve got a piano and play so nice, and every day at work I imagine I am playing. All I want to do is to play a piano. I don’t want clothes. If I have good clothes the girls would want me to go out with them, and I don’t want to go out. It is only trouble comes of it. All I want to do is to stay home and play the piano.”
All the family like music, it seems, “but none of them but me would die for it,” she says. “And my father hated it. He wanted me only to work, day and night to work, since I was ten. But he’s gone away now. They took him away--Randall’s Island.” It was when the father was home, though, and earning a little now and then, that the phonograph, which proved a doubtful blessing, was made possible.
Mary Stober says, and her chin looks very square, that she knows she could pay for lessons--she would walk to the factory instead of riding and go without lunch--if she only had a piano to practice on at home.
It was a mixture of lysol and iodine that she took last week--the only things she could find. “I don’t care what I take,” she says, “if I can’t get what I want. Eight years I’ve worked and I haven’t gotten anything yet.” It was last August that she tried before to kill herself.