"He hain't got anythin' to speak of, I s'pose, an' though I reckon she'll hev prop'ty some day, all that set o' folks seems to marry money, an' some one's alwus dyin' an' leavin' some on 'em some more. The' ain't nothin' truer in the Bible," declared Mrs. Bixbee with conviction, "'n that sayin' thet them that has gits."
"That's seemin'ly about the way it runs in gen'ral," said David.
"It don't seem right," said Mrs. Bixbee, with her eyes on her brother's face. "Now there was all that money one o' Mis' Elbert Swayne's relations left her last year, an' Lucy Scramm, that's poorer 'n poverty's back kitchin, an' the same relation to him that Mis' Swayne was, only got a thousan' dollars, an' the Swaynes rich already. Not but what the thousan' was a godsend to the Scramms, but he might jest as well 'a' left 'em comf'tibly off as not, 'stid of pilin' more onto the Swaynes that didn't need it."
"Does seem kind o' tough," David observed, leaning forward to drop his cigar ash clear of the veranda floor, "but that's the way things goes, an' I've often had to notice that a man'll sometimes do the foolishist thing or the meanest thing in his hull life after he's dead."
"You never told me," said Mrs. Bixbee, after a minute or two, in which she appeared to be following up a train of reflection, "much of anythin' about John's matters. Hain't he ever told you anythin' more 'n what you've told me? or don't ye want me to know? Didn't his father leave anythin'?"
"The' was a little money," replied her brother, blowing out a cloud of smoke, "an' a lot of unlikely chances, but nothin' to live on."
"An' the' wa'n't nothin' for 't but he had to come up here?" she queried.
"He'd 'a' had to work on a salary somewhere, I reckon," was the reply. "The' was one thing," added David thoughtfully after a moment, "that'll mebbe come to somethin' some time, but it may be a good while fust, an' don't you ever let on to him nor nobody else 't I ever said anythin' about it."
"I won't open my head to a livin' soul," she declared. "What was it?"
"Wa'al, I don't know 's I ever told ye," he said, "but a good many years ago I took some little hand in the oil bus'nis, but though I didn't git in as deep as I wish now 't I had, I've alwus kept up a kind of int'rist in what goes on in that line."