Poor White by Anderson, Sherwood, 1876-1941

On the night when he had killed Jim, Joe decided he would walk to the farm and the beech forest and there kill himself. He hurried past a long row of dark stores and warehouses in the newly built section of town and came to a residence street. He saw a man coming toward him and stepped into the stairway of a store building. The man stopped under a street lamp to light a cigar, and the harness maker recognized him. It was Steve Hunter, who had induced him to invest the twelve hundred dollars in the stock of the plant-setting machine company, the man who had brought the new times to Bidwell, the man who was at the bottom of all such innovations as machine-made harnesses. Joe had killed his employee, Jim Gibson, in cold anger, but now a new kind of anger took possession of him. Something danced before his eyes and his hands trembled so that he was afraid the gun he had taken out of his pocket would fall to the sidewalk. It wavered as he raised it and fired, but chance came to his assistance. Steve Hunter pitched forward to the sidewalk.

Without stopping to pick up the revolver that had fallen out of his hand, Joe now ran up a stairway and got into a dark, empty hall. He felt his way along a wall and came presently to another stairway, leading down. It brought him into an alleyway, and going along this he came out near the bridge that led over the river and into what in the old days had been Turner's Pike, the road out which he had driven with his wife to the farm and the beech forest.

But one thing now puzzled Joe Wainsworth. He had lost his revolver and did not know how he was to manage his own death. "I must do it some way," he thought, when at last, after nearly three hours steady plodding and hiding in fields to avoid the teams going along the road he got to the beech forest. He went to sit under a tree near the place where he had so often sat through quiet Sunday afternoons with his wife beside him. "I'll rest a little and then I'll think how I can do it," he thought wearily, holding his head in his hands. "I mustn't go to sleep. If they find me they'll hurt me. They'll hurt me before I have a chance to kill myself. They'll hurt me before I have a chance to kill myself," he repeated, over and over, holding his head in his hands and rocking gently back and forth.

CHAPTER XXII