Another actual experience may demonstrate the
mediaeval treachery of which the Sicilian Mafiuso is capable,
and how little his manners or ideals have progressed in the
last five hundred years or so.
A photographer and his wife, both from Palermo, came to New
York and rented a comfortable home with which was connected a
"studio." In the course of time a young man--a Mafiuso from
Palermo--was engaged as an assistant, and promptly fell in
love with the photographer's wife. She was tired of her
husband, and together they plotted the latter's murder. After
various plans had been considered and rejected, they
determined on poison, and the assistant procured enough
cyanide of mercury to kill a hundred photographers, and turned
it over to his mistress to administer to the victim in his
"Marsala." But at the last moment her hand lost its courage
and she weakly sewed the poison up for future use inside the
ticking of the feather bolster on the marital bed.
This was not at all to the liking of her lover, who thereupon
took matters into his own hands, by hiring another Mafiuso to
remove the photographer with a knife-thrust through the heart.
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