irs window.
They ran into the house and found Wick Cutter lying on a sofa in his
upstairs bedroom, with his throat torn open, bleeding on a roll of
sheets he had placed beside his head.

'Walk in, gentlemen,' he said weakly. 'I am alive, you see, and
competent. You are witnesses that I have survived my wife. You will find
her in her own room. Please make your examination at once, so that there
will be no mistake.'

One of the neighbours telephoned for a doctor, while the others went
into Mrs. Cutter's room. She was lying on her bed, in her night-gown and
wrapper, shot through the heart. Her husband must have come in while she
was taking her afternoon nap and shot her, holding the revolver near her
breast. Her night-gown was burned from the powder.

The horrified neighbours rushed back to Cutter. He opened his eyes
and said distinctly, 'Mrs. Cutter is quite dead, gentlemen, and I am
conscious. My affairs are in order.' Then, Rudolph said, 'he let go and
died.'

On his desk the coroner found a letter, dated at five o'clock that
afternoon. It stated that he had just shot his wife; that any will she
might secretly have made would be invalid, as he survived her. He meant
to shoot himself at six o'clock and would, if he had strength, fire a
shot through the window in the hope that passersby might come in and see
him 'before life was extinct,' as he wrote.

'Now, would you have thought that man had such a cruel heart?' Antonia
turned to me after the story was told. 'To go and do that poor woman out
of any comfort she might have from his money after he was gone!'

'Did you ever hear of anybody else that killed himself for spite, Mr.
Burden?' asked Rudolph.

I admitted that I hadn't. Every lawyer learns over and over how strong
a motive hate can be, but in my collection of legal anecdotes I had
nothing to match this one. When I asked how much the estate amounted to,
Rudolph said it was a little over a hundred thousand dollars.

Cuzak gave me a twinkling, sidelong glance. 'The lawyers, they got a
good deal of it, sure,' he said merrily.

A hundred thousand dollars; so that was the fortune that had been
scraped together by such hard dealing, and that Cutter himself had died
for in the end!

After supper Cuzak and I took a stroll in the orchard and sat down by
the windmill to smoke. He told me his story as if it were my business to
know it.

His father was a shoemaker, his uncle a furrier, and he, being a younger
son