This was news to Hugh. “Had he a brother?”
“Sure had.” The old-timer chuckled. “Lived in cabins side by side an’ didn’t speak to each other for years. I reckon the good Lord never made two more contrary humans than Chug an’ Singlefoot.”
“Where’s Chug now?”
“He’s been daid two years.” He referred the matter to another tobacco-stained relic. “When was it Chug died, Bill?”
Bill made a stab at the date. His friend promptly and indignantly disagreed with him. They argued the matter with acrimony, but Hugh learned nothing definite from the quarrel.
He remembered that newspaper editors are encyclopædias of information and departed from the saloon, even though he had read in an advertisement that “Votaries of Bacchus, Gambrinus, Venus, or Cupid can spend an evening agreeably at the Mammoth.”
The editor made Hugh free of his files. He was not sure about the dates of the two old fellows’ deaths. One had died about three months before the other, but he could not even tell which one had passed away first.
“They were alike as two peas from the same pod,” he explained. “Both cranky, gnarled, and tough old birds. Even their names were almost identical. One was Willis Thornton and the other William Thornton.”
Hugh’s eye quickened. He had an intuition that he was on the edge of an important discovery, though he could not guess what it was. He looked through the back files till he came to the issue of August 14th of two years earlier. A short story on the back page was the one he wanted. The last sentence of it sent a pulse of excitement beating through his blood. The story read:
OBITUARY