The Schirmer Inheritance Read Online Free PDF

they had preferred to ignore altogether. Besides, the enterpriseof a Milwaukee paper had just then given the story yet another twist. With the help of the immigration authorities, this paper’s special investigator had been able to discover the number of families named Schneider who had emigrated from Germany in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The number was large. Was it too much to suppose, the paper had asked, that at least one of the Old Forty-niner’s younger brothers had followed his example in emigrating? No indeed! The hunt had been on again, and squads of special investigators had gone forth to pad hopefully through city records, land registers, and state archives in the footsteps of the immigrant Schneiders.
    George repacked the parcel with a sigh. He knew already that he was not going to enjoy the next few weeks.
    The total number of claims made was just over eight thousand and he found that there was a separate file for each. Most had only two or three letters in them, but many were quite thick, while some had parcels to themselves and bulged with affidavits, photostats of documents, tattered photographs, and genealogical tables. A few had old Bibles and other family souvenirs in them, and one, for some inexplicable reason, even contained a greasy fur cap.
    George set to work. By the end of his first week he had been through seven hundred of the claims and was feeling sorry for Messrs. Moreton, Greener and Cleek. Many, of course, had come from lunatics and cranks. There was the angry man in North Dakota who said that
his
name was Martin Schneider, that he was
not
dead, and that Amelia Johnson had stolen the money from him while he lay sleeping. There was the woman who claimed the estate on behalf of a Californian society for the propagation of the Cataphrygian heresy, on the grounds that the spirit of the late Amelia had entered into Mrs. Schultz, the society’s honorary treasurer. And there was the man, writing in multi-coloured inks from a state hospital, whosaid that he was the legitimate son of Amelia by a secret first marriage to a coloured man. But the majority of the claimants seemed to be persons who, while not actually insane, had rudimentary notions of what constituted evidence. There was, for instance, a Chicago man named Higgins who had evolved an elaborate claim from the memory of having heard his father say that Cousin Amelia was a wicked old miser; and another man had pressed for a share of the estate on the strength of an old letter from a Danish relative named Schneider. Then there were those who warily declined to send evidence to support their claims lest it should be stolen and used to prove the case of another claimant, and others who demanded travelling expenses in order that they might present their cases in person to the administrator. Above all, there were the lawyers.
    Only thirty-four out of the first seven hundred claims which George examined had been handled by attorneys, but it took him over two days to get through those particular files. The claims in question were mostly of doubtful validity, and one or two were patently dishonest. In George’s view, no reputable lawyer would have touched any of them. But these had been disreputable lawyers; they had both touched and held on. They had quoted non-existent precedents and photographed useless documents. They had hired dishonest inquiry agents to conduct pointless investigations, and quack genealogists to draw up faked family trees. They had written portentous letters and uttered obscure threats. The only thing, apparently, that none of them had ever done was to advise his client to withdraw a claim. In one of these files there was a letter to the administrator from an old woman named Snyder, regretting that she had no more money left to pay her attorney to act for her, and asking that her claim should not on this account be overlooked.
    In his second week on the records, George managed, inspite of a severe cold in the