The Man from Brodney's

by George Barr McCutcheon

The estate was settled—closed!

Mr. Saunders was mentioned nowadays only in narrative form, and but rarely in that way. True, they had promised to visit the little place in Hammersmith if they happened to be passing by, and they had graciously admitted that it would give them much pleasure to meet his good mother.

Two months have passed since the Deppinghams departed from Japat, "for good and all." Many events have come to pass since that memorable day, not the least of which was the exchanging of £500,000 sterling, less attorneys' and executors' fees. To be perfectly explicit and as brief as possible, Lady Deppingham and Robert Browne divided that amount of money and passed into legal history as the "late claimants to the Estate of Taswell Skaggs."

It was Sir John Brodney's enterprise. He saw the way out of the difficulty and he acted as pathfinder to the other and less perceiving counsellors, all of whom had looked forward to an endless controversy.

The business of the Japat Company and all that it entailed was transferred by agreement to a syndicate of Jews!

Never before was there such a stupendous deal in futures.

Soon after the arrival in England of the two claimants, it became known that the syndicate was casting longing eyes upon the far-away garden of rubies and sapphires. There was no hope of escape from a long, bitter contest in the courts. Sir John perhaps saw that there was a possible chance to break the will of the testator; he was an old man and he would hardly live long enough to fight the case to the end. In the interregnum, his clients, the industrious islanders, would be slaving themselves into a hale old age and a subsequently unhallowed grave, none the wiser and none the richer than when the contest began, except for the proportionately insignificant share that was theirs by right of original possession. Sir John took it upon himself to settle the matter while his clients were still in a condition to appreciate the results. He proposed a compromise.

It was not so much a question of jurisprudence, he argued, as it was a matter of self-protection for all sides to the controversy—more particularly that side which assembled the inhabitants of Japat.

And so it came to pass that the Jews, after modifying some twenty or thirty propositions of their own, ultimately assumed the credit of evolving the plan that had originated in the resourceful head of Sir John Brodney, and affairs were soon brought to a close.

The grandchildren of the testators were ready to accept the best settlement that could be obtained. Theirs was a rather forlorn hope, to begin with. When it was proposed that Agnes Deppingham and Robert Browne should accept £250,000 apiece in lieu of all claims, moral or legal, against the estate, they leaped at the chance.