I am more than all that--I am a murderer; a murderer before
the law; a murderer before God; and worse than a murderer before
the pure woman whom I love more than anything that God could make."
He paused for a moment and wiped the perspiration from his face.
"Sir," said Mason, "this is all drivel, infantile drivel. What you
are is of no importance. How to get out is the problem, how to get
out."
Samuel Walcott leaned forward, poured out a glass of brandy and
swallowed it.
"Well," he said, speaking slowly, "my right name is Richard Warren.
In the spring of 1879 I came to New York and fell in with the real
Samuel Walcott, a young man with a little money and some property
which his grandfather had left him. We became friends, and
concluded to go to the far west together. Accordingly we scraped
together what money we could lay our hands on, and landed in the
gold-mining regions of California. We were young and
inexperienced, and our money went rapidly. One April morning we
drifted into a little shack camp, away up in the Sierra Nevadas,
called Hell's Elbow. Here we struggled and starved for perhaps a
year.
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