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the money from customers he put into his pockets, only my sales were all rung up. I think that's illegal: tax defraud or something. Sometimes, when he was real pleased with himself, he'd look at me over his glasses and say, "See, Jonnie, that's how you run a good business. You're learning from me. You're learning and getting good experience; that's worth more than wages. So pay attention, and one day you'll run this store." It wasn't that I wanted his store. It was just as old and dirty as he was. He was just so old. It wasn't right that he should be so old and go on cheating people, and taking their money. Some of the men worked awfully hard and they'd come in and want to buy a pin or something for their girl friends. Then he'd put on a lot of fuss and talk of Fifth Avenue, and make up prices. Hell, the dime stores wouldn't have carried the stuff he sold them. So I figured maybe it wasn't right that a useless old man like him should cheat young ones like that. I used to work pretty hard keeping the place clean at least, and he'd just sit at his desk in the back room in his dirty old clothes, and when he didn't pay me in full he'd say I was earning experience. Then one day he got a letter asking what happened to a certain shipment. Well, I mailed it all right. I'm sure the clerk at the Post Office would have remembered, because I wrapped it in cut-up paper sacks-we were out of paper-and he laughed at it. But NIr. Hicklemeyer wouldn't hear of going down to check, he just claimed I must have lost it, or kept it. So he was going to make me pay for it. nut I felt this wasn't right. It wasn't fair for him to carryon and take advantage of me because 1 was young and his rheumatism bothered him too much to go to the Post Office. Then I got real mad all of a sudden, and I guess I killed him. I guess I just hit him very hard. He was sort of like a dried up mosquito suckling blood from the young and juicy ones. They do that, you know: we read about it in school. So I swatted him, like a mosquito. They're pest and no good. So that's how I came to kill him. That's all there's to it, I guess.