utter 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 passers-by 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 had n'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, was apprenticed to the latter's trade. You never got anywhere working
for your relatives, he said, so when he was a journeyman he went to Vienna
and worked in a big fur shop, earning good money. But a young fellow who
liked a good time did n't save anything in Vienna; there were too many
pleasant ways of spending every night what he'd made in the day. After
three years there, he came to New York. He was badly advised and went to
work on furs during a strike, when the factories were offering big wages.
The strikers won, and Cuzak was blacklisted. As he had a few hundred
dollars ahead, he decided to go to Florida and raise oranges. He had
always thought he would like to raise oranges! The second year a hard
frost killed his young grove, and he fell ill with malaria. He came to
Nebraska to visit his cousin, Anton Jelinek, and to look about. When he