The case was to come up early in July, and I spent most of my time, to the detriment of other affairs, in preparing for it.  I was greatly hampered in my work by my client, who filled my office with his tobacco-smoke and that of his friends, and he took it very much for granted that he was going to win the suit.  Fortune had always played into his hands, he said, and I had no little difficulty in convincing him that matters had passed from his hands into mine.  In this I believe I was never entirely successful.  I soon found, too, that he had no ideas whatever on the value of discretion, and it was only by repeated threats of absolute failure that I prevented our secret tactics from becoming the property of his sporting fraternity and of the town.

The more I worked on the case, the clearer it became to me that Mr. Farquhar Fenelon Cooke’s great-uncle had been either a consummate scoundrel or a lunatic, and that our only hope of winning must be based on proving him one or the other; it did not matter much which, for my expectations at best were small.  When I had at length settled to this conclusion I confided it as delicately as possible to my client, who was sitting at the time with his feet cocked up on the office table, reading a pink newspaper.

“Which’ll be the easier to prove?” he asked, without looking up.

“It would be more charitable to prove he had been out of his mind,” I replied, “and perhaps easier.”

“Charity be damned,” said this remarkable man.  “I’m after the property.”

So I decided on insanity.  I hunted up and subpoenaed white-haired witnesses for miles around.  Many of them shook their heads when they spoke of Mr. Cooke’s great-uncle, and some knew more of his private transactions than I could have wished, and I trembled lest my own witnesses should be turned against me.  I learned more of Mr. Cooke’s great-uncle than I knew of Mr. Cooke himself, and to the credit of my client be it said that none of his relative’s traits were apparent in him, with the possible exception of insanity; and that defect, if it existed in the grand-nephew, took in him a milder and less criminal turn.  The old rascal, indeed, had so cleverly worded his deed of sale as to obtain payment without transfer.  It was a trifle easier to avoid being specific in that country in his day than it is now, and the document was, in my opinion, sufficiently vague to admit of a double meaning.  The original sale had been made to a man, now dead, whom the railroad had bought out.  The Copper Rise property was mentioned among the other lands in the will in favor of Mr. Farquhar Fenelon Cooke, and the latter had gone ahead improving them and increasing their output in spite of the repeated threats of the railroad to bring suit.  And it was not until its present attorney had come in and investigated the title that the railroad had resorted to the law.  I mention here, by the way, that my client was the sole heir.