"You miserable thief!" they cried. "You were a party to the fraud practised upon us by that good-for-nothing brother of ours, who wanted to rob us in order to benefit that boy. You helped him to fill the caldron with rusty nails and bits of old iron. Now you are here, you may as well have your share."
With that they each seized hold of a stick, and began to beat Prepelicza till he was black and blue. Off he went to a doctor for a certificate as to his wounds, and then to the barber, who had to write a long letter to the king in his name, complaining of the behavior of the two brothers Gregorics toward one of his honest (?) subjects.
"If the king is not ashamed of them as subjects, I am not ashamed of owning how I have been beaten; they were two to one!"
Then he hired a cart (for it was impossible for him to walk in his present state), and drove to Varecska, where Mrs. Panyóki spent the summer, and told her the whole tale from beginning to end.
The result was the lawsuit Panyóki versus Gregorics, which furnished the neighborhood with gossip for ten years. A whole legion of witnesses had to be examined, and the deeds and papers increased to such an extent that at the end they weighed seventy-three pounds. Mrs. Panyóki could only prove the existence of the caldron, its having been walled in, and its appropriation later on by the two brothers, who, on their part, tried to prove that it contained nothing of value, only a number of rusty nails and odd bits of iron. As the dead man had no lawyer to defend him, he lost the lawsuit, for it was certain he had played the trick on his relations, and thus brought about the lawsuit, which only ended when it was all the same which side lost or won it, for the seventy-three pounds of paper and the six lawyers had eaten up the whole of the Gregorics and Panyóki fortunes. By degrees all the members of the family died in poverty, and were forgotten; only Pál Gregorics lived in the memories of the six lawyers, who remarked from time to time: "He was a clever man!"
But in spite of all researches, the dead man's fortune was still missing, not a trace of it was to be found, no one had inherited it except rumor, which did as it liked with it, decreased it, increased it, placed it here or there at pleasure.