When he had been living in the Bartell home a little more than a year, he broke his leg.  He sustained the injury through playing on the forbidden roof—­as all boys have done and will continue to do to the end of time.  The leg was broken in two places between the knee and thigh.  Emil, helped by his frightened playmates, managed to drag himself to the front sidewalk, where he fainted.  The children of the neighbourhood were afraid of the hard-featured shrew who presided over the Bartell house; but, summoning their resolution, they rang the bell and told Ann Bartell of the accident.  She did not even look at the little lad who lay stricken on the sidewalk, but slammed the door and went back to her wash-tub.  The time passed.  A drizzle came on, and Emil Gluck, out of his faint, lay sobbing in the rain.  The leg should have been set immediately.  As it was, the inflammation rose rapidly and made a nasty case of it.  At the end of two hours, the indignant women of the neighbourhood protested to Ann Bartell.  This time she came out and looked at the lad.  Also she kicked him in the side as he lay helpless at her feet, and she hysterically disowned him.  He was not her child, she said, and recommended that the ambulance be called to take him to the city receiving hospital.  Then she went back into the house.

It was a woman, Elizabeth Shepstone, who came along, learned the situation, and had the boy placed on a shutter.  It was she who called the doctor, and who, brushing aside Ann Bartell, had the boy carried into the house.  When the doctor arrived, Ann Bartell promptly warned him that she would not pay him for his services.  For two months the little Emil lay in bed, the first month on his back without once being turned over; and he lay neglected and alone, save for the occasional visits of the unremunerated and over-worked physician.  He had no toys, nothing with which to beguile the long and tedious hours.  No kind word was spoken to him, no soothing hand laid upon his brow, no single touch or act of loving tenderness—­naught but the reproaches and harshness of Ann Bartell, and the continually reiterated information that he was not wanted.  And it can well be understood, in such environment, how there was generated in the lonely, neglected boy much of the bitterness and hostility for his kind that later was to express itself in deeds so frightful as to terrify the world.

It would seem strange that, from the hands of Ann Bartell, Emil Gluck should have received a college education; but the explanation is simple.  Her ne’er-do-well husband, deserting her, made a strike in the Nevada goldfields, and returned to her a many-times millionaire.  Ann Bartell hated the boy, and immediately she sent him to the Farristown Academy, a hundred miles away.  Shy and sensitive, a lonely and misunderstood little soul, he was more lonely than ever at Farristown.  He never came home, at vacation, and holidays, as the other boys