The Millbank Case: A Maine Mystery of To-day

The Millbank Case A MAINE MYSTERY OF TO-DAY
BY GEORGE DYRE ELDRIDGE
With a Frontispiece in Colour By Eliot Keen
NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1905
Copyright, 1905 BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Published May, 1905
THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS RAHWAY, N. J.

THE MILLBANK CASE
THEODORE WING had no known enemy in the world. He was a man of forty; “well-to-do,” as they say in New England; a lawyer by profession, and already “mentioned” for a county judgeship. He was unmarried, but there were those who had hopes, and there was scarce a spinster in Millbank who hadn’t a kindly word and smile for him—at times. He was not a church member, but it was whispered that his clergyman was disposed to look leniently on this shortcoming, for Wing was a regular attendant at service and liberal with money for church purposes, which, shrewd guessers said, some of the church members were not.
Wing lived in the River Road, just at the top of Parlin’s Hill. He was from “over East, somewheres,” and had come to Millbank as a law student, when old Judge Parlin was at the head of the Maine bar. He became in turn chief clerk, junior partner, and finally full partner to the judge, and when the latter died—of disappointment, it was said, due to failure to secure the chief justiceship—Wing became the head of the firm, and finally the firm itself; for he had a dislike for partnerships, and at forty his office associates were employés associated in particular cases, not partners in the general business.
Judge Parlin was less than sixty years of age when he died and left a widow, the Parlin homestead, and an estate of private debts, that seemed to breed as Wing attempted to untangle affairs. For years his income had been large and his expenses small. His townsmen had rated him as their richest man who was not of the great Millbank logging firms. There was not a man but would have considered it an insult to the town to hint that Judge Parlin was worth less than a hundred thousand dollars. His investments turned out the veriest cats and dogs; and even in cases where the security might have been ample, the papers were often executed with such carelessness that collection rested on the honesty of the borrower and not on sufficiency of documentary evidence. In fact, the debts outvalued the resources two to one—that is, they seemed to, until it was announced that the Parlin homestead had been sold for a sum sufficient to pay all obligations and leave the widow a life income of five hundred dollars a year. People understood when it was learned that Wing himself was the purchaser.