“I believe you—and that is not to your uncle’s credit. You say he is shiftless and lazy?”
“Very—and everybody around here knows it.”
“Then he is not fit to be your guardian.”
“I don’t believe he is, legally. He just said he was going to be, that’s all.”
“Well, that doesn’t make him so,” answered the hunter, with a grim smile.
With Andy he went over the papers the boy had brought from home. They seemed to prove that the lad’s father owned a divided interest in a large tract of timber in the upper portion of Michigan. The papers had evidently been drawn up by somebody who knew very little about legal matters, and the phraseology was highly perplexing. After poring over them for an hour, and asking Professor Jeffer’s advice, Barwell Dawson shook his head slowly.
“I think it is an honest claim, and in your father’s favor,” he said. “But it will take a skillful lawyer to unravel it. Certainly your father bought something, and paid for it, for here are the words, ‘one thousand dollars, the receipt of which from Andrew S. Graham is hereby admitted.’ The writer meant ‘acknowledged,’ but I guess ‘admitted’ is good enough.”
“I was going to take it to a lawyer in Lodgeport.”
“Is he a reliable man, Andy?”
“I don’t know—I suppose so.”