Then there was the list of claimants to the estate, which had now been swelled from all parts of the world, and the series of suits and pleas, and Heaven knows what other litigation threatened by them, making Gordian knot Number 6. Finally, the estate was in Chancery. Knot Number 7.
Here was a pleasant prospect for the heir! To put all the rest on one side, on the day that the building leases expired, and he stepped forward to claim his rights, the building societies would present him with the following neat little bill:—
“After all,” said Marese to Theodore, as they planned and schemed, and smoked cigars at 120 shillings the hundred, “after all, old fellow, this is but one year’s income if I could only get possession. And I believe we could finance the thing and raise the money without difficulty, if it were not for those cursed, hateful claimants from America and elsewhere. The Jews fight shy on account of the title difficulty. If we could but get rid of those claimants!”
Chapter Twelve.
There was once a very wise man who invented what was considered a saying almost inspired, which was afterwards inculcated as a most important lesson by mighty princes upon their sons, and continues to be constantly quoted in our day with approval—it is, that “Unity is strength.” But the strength of the claimants to the Baskette estate consisted in the number of their scattered forces.
All that Marese, the heir, could have desired was that by some means they could be condensed into one person, and thus destroyed at a blow. They had increased as the years went by in a geometrical ratio, till the total formed a small battalion.
When the idea of making claims upon the estate first arose in America, there were already quite fifty families who in one way or another thought they had “rights.” About a dozen visited Stirmingham, and all but drove poor old Sternhold frantic. That was a generation ago, and the tribe had nearly trebled. Mothers of children who had the remotest possible chance of a share in the prize took care to have them christened Baskette or Sternhold. There were Sternhold Baskette Browns, Baskette Johnsons, Baskette Stirmingham Slicks, English Baskette Williamsons, and every possible combination of Baskette.
Those who, either by the male or female side, really could show some species of proof that they were descended from the seventeen squatters who were transhipped to the States now numbered no less than one hundred and forty-three individuals—men, women, and children. To distinguish themselves from other claimants, they called themselves “The True Swampers.”