An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (i can read book club .TXT) 📕

ought to know. I’ll go up and get it myself. Then I want to go to Grass Lake and Three Mile Bay and Sharon yet today, if I can, and see what else I can find. But I’m afraid, Orville, it’s a plain case of murder. The way he took that young girl to that hotel up there at Grass Lake and then registered under another name at Big Bittern, and the way he had her leave her bag and took his own with him!” He shook his head most solemnly. “Those are not the actions of an honest young man, Orville, and you know it. What I can’t understand is how her parents could let her go off like that anywhere with a man without knowing about him in the first place.”

“That’s true,” replied Mason, tactfully, but made intensely curious by the fact that it had at least been partially established that the girl in the case was not as good as she should have been. Adultery! And with some youth of means, no doubt, from some one of the big cities to the south. The prominence and publicity with which his own activities in connection with this were very likely to be laden! At once he got up, energetically stirred. If he could only catch such a reptilian criminal, and that in the face of all the sentiment that such a brutal murder was likely to inspire! The August convention and nominations. The fall election.

“Well, I’ll be switched,” he exclaimed, the presence of Heit, a religious and conservative man, suppressing anything more emphatic. “I do believe we’re on the trail of something important, Fred. I really think so. It looks very black to me⁠—a most damnable outrage. I suppose the first thing to do, really, is to telephone over there and see if there is such a family as Alden and exactly where they live. It’s not more than fifty miles direct by car, if that much. Poor roads, though,” he added. Then: “That poor woman. I dread that scene. It will be a painful one, I know.”

Then he called Zillah and asked her to ascertain if there was such a person as Titus Alden living near Biltz. Also, exactly how to get there. Next he added: “The first thing to do will be to get Burton back here” (Burton being Burton Burleigh, his legal assistant, who had gone away for a weekend vacation) “and put him in charge so as to furnish you whatever you need in the way of writs and so on, Fred, while I go right over to see this poor woman. And then, if you’ll have Earl go back up there and get that suitcase, I’ll be most obliged to you. I’ll bring the father back with me, too, to identify the body. But don’t say anything at all about this letter now or my going over there until I see you later, see.” He grasped the hand of his friend. “In the meantime,” he went on, a little grandiosely, now feeling the tang of great affairs upon him, “I want to thank you, Fred. I certainly do, and I won’t forget it, either. You know that, don’t you?” He looked his old friend squarely in the eye. “This may turn out better than we think. It looks to be the biggest and most important case in all my term of office, and if we can only clean it up satisfactorily and quickly, before things break here this fall, it may do us all some good, eh?”

“Quite so, Orville, quite so,” commented Fred Heit. “Not, as I said before, that I think we ought to mix politics in with a thing like this, but since it has come about so⁠—” he paused, meditatively.

“And in the meantime,” continued the district attorney, “if you’ll have Earl have some pictures made of the exact position where the boat, oars, and hat were found, as well as mark the spot where the body was found, and subpoena as many witnesses as you can, I’ll have vouchers for it all put through with the auditor. And tomorrow or Monday I’ll pitch in and help myself.”

And here he gripped Heit’s right hand⁠—then patted him on the shoulder. And Heit, much gratified by his various moves so far⁠—and in consequence hopeful for the future⁠—now took up his weird straw hat and buttoning his thin, loose coat, returned to his office to get his faithful Earl on the long distance telephone to instruct him and to say that he was returning to the scene of the crime himself.

IV

Orville Mason could readily sympathize with a family which on sight struck him as having, perhaps, like himself endured the whips, the scorns and contumelies of life. As he drove up in his official car from Bridgeburg at about four o’clock that Saturday afternoon, there was the old tatterdemalion farmhouse and Titus Alden himself in his shirtsleeves and overalls coming up from a pigpen at the foot of the hill, his face and body suggesting a man who is constantly conscious of the fact that he has made out so poorly. And now Mason regretted that he had not telephoned before leaving Bridgeburg, for he could see that the news of his daughter’s death would shock such a man as this most terribly. At the same time, Titus, noting his approach and assuming that it might be someone who was seeking a direction, civilly approached him.

“Is this Mr. Titus Alden?”

“Yes, sir, that’s my name.”

“Mr. Alden, my name is Mason. I am from Bridgeburg, district attorney of Cataraqui County.”

“Yes, sir,” replied Titus, wondering by what strange chance the district attorney of so distant a county should be approaching and inquiring of him. And Mason now looked at Titus, not knowing just how to begin. The bitterness of the news he had to impart⁠—the crumpling power of it upon such an obviously feeble and inadequate soul. They had paused under one of the large,