Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol.122, No. 6, October 1, 1938

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She had signed her own death-warrant. He kept telling himself over and over that he was not to blame, she had brought it on herself. He had never seen the man but he knew there was one. He had known for six weeks now.

One day he came home and there was a cigar butt in an ashtray, still moist at one end, still warm at the other. There were gasoline-drippings on the asphalt in front of their house, and they didn’t own a car. And it wouldn’t be a delivery-vehicle, because the drippings showed it had stood there a long time, an hour or more at least. And once he had actually glimpsed it, just rounding the far corner as he got off the bus two blocks down the other way. A second-hand Ford.

She was often very flustered when he came home, hardly seemed to know what she was doing or saying at all.

He pretended not to see any of these things; he was that type of man. Stapp, he didn’t bring his hates or grudges out into the open where they had a chance to heal. He nursed them in the darkness of his mind. That’s a dangerous kind of a man.

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