The old man told me the actress
was his sister. He is sixty years old and the actress whose story
appeared in the newspapers is twenty, but he spoke of their childhood
together. "You would not realize it to see us now but we were poor
then," he said. "It's true. We lived in a little house on the side of a
hill. Once when there was a storm the wind nearly swept our house away.
How the wind blew. Our father was a carpenter and he built strong houses
for other people but our own house he did not build very strongly." He
shook his head sorrowfully. "My sister the actress has got into trouble.
Our house is not built very strongly," he said as I went away along the
path.
For a month, two months, the Chicago newspapers, that are delivered
every morning in our village, have been filled with the story of a
murder. A man there has murdered his wife and there seems no reason for
the deed. The tale runs something like this--
The man, who is now on trial in the courts and will no doubt be hanged,
worked in a bicycle factory where he was a foreman, and lived with his
wife and his wife's mother in an apartment in Thirty-Second Street. He
loved a girl who worked in the office of the factory where he was
employed. She came from a town in Iowa and when she first came to the
city lived with her aunt who has since died.
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