THE MOONLIT ROAD
1: Statement of Joel Hetman, Jr.
I AM the most unfortunate of men. Rich, respected,
fairly well educated and of sound health--with
many other advantages usually valued by those
having them and coveted by those who have them
not--I sometimes think that I should be less un-
happy if they had been denied me, for then the
contrast between my outer and my inner life would
not be continually demanding a painful attention. In
the stress of privation and the need of effort I might
sometimes forget the sombre secret ever baffling the
conjecture that it compels.
I am the only child of Joel and Julia Hetman. The
one was a well-to-do country gentleman, the other
a beautiful and accomplished woman to whom he
was passionately attached with what I now know
to have been a jealous and exacting devotion.
The family home was a few miles from Nash-
ville, Tennessee, a large, irregularly built dwell-
ing of no particular order of architecture, a
little way off the road, in a park of trees and
shrubbery.
At the time of which I write I was nineteen years
old, a student at Yale. One day I received a tele-
gram from my father of such urgency that in com-
pliance with its unexplained demand I left at once
for home. At the railway station in Nashville a dis-
tant relative awaited me to apprise me of the reason
for my recall: my mother had been barbarously
murdered--why and by whom none could conjec-
ture, but the circumstances were these.
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