“Your son——”
“Yes, Jerry, of course. I knew that, too. But what’s he done this time?”
“This is, as I said, a very serious——”
“Good Lord, man! I didn’t s’pose you’d took a four-hour train ride from New York a night like this to tell me he’d won a ping pong prize or joined the Y. M. C. A. The chap that’s got to have news broke to him has a head too thick for truth to be let into it any other way. Don’t stand there like a lump of putty. What’s up?”
The lawyer, flushing at the coarse invective, spared the father no longer. He spoke, and to the point.
“Your son,” he said, “is in the West Thirtieth Street police station on a charge of murder.”
Conover looked at him without a start, without visible emotion. For a full half minute he made no reply, no comment. Nor did his light, keen eyes flicker or turn aside.
Then—and Wendell feared from his words that the tidings had turned Caleb’s brain—the Railroader muttered, half to himself:
“‘And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.’”