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Page 96
One morning, two years ago, Cutter went into the hardware store and bought
a pistol, saying he was going to shoot a dog, and adding that he `thought
he would take a shot at an old cat while he was about it.' (Here the
children interrupted Rudolph's narrative by smothered giggles.)
Cutter went out behind the hardware store, put up a target, practised for
an hour or so, and then went home. At six o'clock that evening, when
several men were passing the Cutter house on their way home to supper, they
heard a pistol shot. They paused and were looking doubtfully at one
another, when another shot came crashing through an upstairs 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, 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 didn'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
began to look about, he saw Antonia, and she was exactly the kind of girl
he had always been hunting for. They were married at once, though he had
to borrow money from his cousin to buy the wedding ring.
`It was a pretty hard job, breaking up this place and making the first
crops grow,' he said, pushing back his hat and scratching his grizzled
hair. `Sometimes I git awful sore on this place and want to quit, but my
wife she always say we better stick it out. The babies come along pretty
fast, so it look like it be hard to move, anyhow. I guess she was right,
all right. We got this place clear now. We pay only twenty dollars an
acre then, and I been offered a hundred. We bought another quarter ten
years ago, and we got it most paid for. We got plenty boys; we can work a
lot of land. Yes, she is a good wife for a poor man. She ain't always so
strict with me, neither. Sometimes maybe I drink a little too much beer in
town, and when I come home she don't say nothing. She don't ask me no
questions. We always get along fine, her and me, like at first. The
children don't make trouble between us, like sometimes happens.' He lit
another pipe and pulled on it contentedly.
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