LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER I.—A CITY OF FEAR.

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      I shall never know what dreadful impulse compels me to write it all down.

      My life is so many, many times forfeit to the State that were my hideous secret to become known, even now, after all these years, within an hour infuriated crowds would gather at my gate and I should be torn limb from limb without the slightest hope of mercy or reprieve.

      I shall never be forgiven.

      My crimes were too brutal. I spared neither young nor old, and every deed of violence that could bring pain and horror it was fiendish joy to do.

      I have before me now a blurred, torn page of an old newspaper—all dim and ghostly in its faded ink. It has great, startling headlines, and all about me.

      The fiend of the ages it calls me—the criminal of all time; a foul and dreadful maniac stalking through the city with his bloody hands uplifted against all mankind; a very prince of vileness; a monster that out-Satans Satan in his crimes; and so on, and so on.

      So many times I wonder if it can possibly be all true, and if it be, after all, nothing but the nightmare of some cruel and dreadful dream.

      How well do I remember the very exact words in which the 'Adelaide Evening Journal' recorded the discovery of the first crime. I read and re-read them so often that every line is seared for ever in my mind.

      "Early this morning," they run, "a terrible discovery was made on the park lands between North Adelaide and the bank of the Torrens River. Michael Dayman, a workman in the employ of Messrs. John Shearer and Sons, the well-known agricultural implement makers of Kilkenny, was passing along a lower road when he noticed under a clump of trees what he at first thought was the form of a sleeping man.

      "Approaching the spot, however, he was horrified to find that the man was dead, and that his face was covered with blood. He saw the head had been terribly battered in. Dayman communicated at once with the Bowden police, and within an hour the body had been conveyed to the city mortuary. There it was almost immediately identified as that of Alderman Charles Bentley, who had been missing from his home since last evening.

      "The dreadful news at once occasioned a tremendous sensation in the city, and the flags on all the public buildings were immediately placed at half-mast. It is certain that a terrible and ghastly murder has been committed, but it is too early as yet to hazard any guess as to the motive for the crime. Robbery, however, it was not, for nothing at all had been removed from the person of the dead man. His watch, his ring, and all his other valuables were quite intact. The police are naturally reticent about the matter, but it is understood that his wounds were of a terrible nature, and that death must have been almost instantaneous after the blows.

      "The utmost sympathy is extended to the deceased's relatives. The alderman was too well known to our readers for us to refer now to his public life and work. In our grief we can only say that not only has the city of Adelaide lost one of the most loyal and honored sons, but that the whole State of South Australia also, and the great Commonwealth itself, is poorer by his loss. It will be the sincere prayer of everyone that the vile and brutal murderer may be speedily brought to book."

      It was a terrible thing that I should kill that poor old man, and yet his death lay only at the very beginning of my path of crime. It was as nothing to what was to follow later. Week after week, horror upon horror was to gather on the city; fear was to hang over it like a dreadful cloud, and panic even was to seize the strongest as they went upon their ways.

      Did I do all this?

      Could it possibly be I who was the man? Could it, indeed, be I who, in those hot midsummer days, made great strong men afraid of their own shadows, and brought this nameless terror into all their lives; who made each lonely road at dusk a path of dread and of possible foul, awful crime; who filled ten thousand gentle breasts with horror, and who made the very faces of the children blanch and whiten when the night wind stirred among the trees?

      Every day almost I tell myself it must be all a dream. I could never have done such wrongs.

      I was always such a coward and such a law-abiding man. I have always had such horror of violence and have always been so meek and gentle in my ways.

      No—no, it is all a mistake. I have been sick and ill, and all these thoughts came only to me in the tossing of some fevered sleep. I am harmless and innocent as other men are.

      But alas! often I take out that dreadful

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