in a heap. And when she came to, I was sitting on the floor and had her kind of half up in my arms. She wasn't much larger than you, miss—and even at fifteen I was a pretty big fellow. When she came to I said to her, 'Is there going to be another dead baby, mother?' You see, I knew from experience—her fainting that way.
"She looked up at me, like a deer I saw die once, after my father had shot him, and she nodded, and big tears came out of her eyes.
"'I wish he was dead! Oh, I wish Joe was dead!' my mother said to me in a whisper (Joe was my stepfather), and began to cry right against me—here." He touched his shoulder.
"I'll never forget it. She was like a little helpless child. My stepfather was snoring up in the loft, at that moment, and I wished he was dead, too! He was killing her, miss. She was a frail little thing. Oh, so weak and frail—like a hepatica, the kind that grow in the woods up there—no color hardly at all.
"From that moment I began to think of ways of killing my stepfather. At first I just kind of played with the idea, the way you imagine holding up trains and things. But each time he came home drunk, and talked rough to my sick mother, and made her march around and mind him, as if she was a dog, and cry nights, my thoughts got down to real business. The scheme I hit on finally came all in a flash one Sunday morning when my stepfather was out in the shed cleaning his guns and rifles. He loved fire-arms, and was as tender with them as a woman with a baby. He'd kind of pat and stroke them, and call them his beauties. I was never allowed to touch any of my
