At fifteen years of age I killed a man, and found, in a murder
undertaken for very definite reasons, a thrill beyond expectation.
It was as though I had drunk at a wayside spring and found an
elixir. That incident is unknown; the death of my father's foreman,
Job Trevose, has not been understood till now. He lived at Paul, a
village upon the heights nigh Penzance, and his walk to his work
took him by the coast-guard track along lofty cliffs. Among the
fish-curing sheds one day, unseen, I chanced to hear Trevose speak
of my mother to another man and declare that she did evil and
dishonoured my father.
From that moment I doomed Trevose to death and, some weeks later,
after many failures to win the right conditions, caught him alone in
a sea fog as he returned homeward. There was not a soul on the
cliff path but ourselves; and he was a small man, I a strong, big
boy. I walked beside him for fifty paces, then fell behind, leaped
at his neck and hurled him over the cliff in an instant. One yell he
gave and dropped six hundred feet.
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