Ottumwa tri-weekly courier. [volume] (Ottumwa, Iowa) 1903-1916, 1913-11-29
CHAPTER V.
The Letter,

serial from an explanatory marble
quarrying company, quarterly state
ment of club house-committee. The
last two missives bore a nondescript
look.
One was small, with the name of a
legal firm in it's corner. The other
was largish, corpulent and heavy, OF
stout Manila paper, and bore, down
one side, a gaudy procession of pos
tage stamps proclaiming that it had
been registered.
whats in that, I wonder?" he said
to himself, and then, with smile at
the unmasculine speculation, opened
the smaller envelope.
Dear Sir" began the letter, in the
most uncompromisingly conventional
of typewriting:
Dear Sir:
Enclosed please find. with title
deed, a memorandum opened in your
name by the late John Valiant some
years before his death. It was his de-
sire that the services indicated in con.
nection with this estate should con-
tinue till this date. We hand you
herewith our check for $4,000 two
hundred and thirty-six dollars and
twenty cents), the balance in your
favor, for which please send receipt,
"And oblige,
yours very truly,
"(Enclosure) Emerson and Ball..
He turned to the memorandum. 1t
showed stable initial deposit
against which was entered series OF
annual tax payments with minor dis
bursements credited to "InspectiOn and
care" The tax receipts were pinned
to the account.
The larger wrapper contained an
unsealed envelope. across which was
written in faded ink and in an un.
familiar dashing, slanting handwriting,
his own name. The envelope con-
tanned a creased yellow parchment,
from between whose folds there
dumped and fluttered down upon the
floor long fattish object wrapped in
a paper, a newspaper clipping and a
letter.
Puzzledly he unfolded the cracking
thing in his hands. Why he said
half aloud, 'it's--it's'a deed made over
to me-" He overran 1t swiftly. Part
of an old colony grant a
plantation in Virginia, twelve hundred
odd acres, given under the hand OF
vice-regal governor in the sixteenth
century. I had no idea titles in the
United States went back SO far as
that!' His eye fed to the end. 1T
was my fathers! What could he have
wanted of an estate in Virginia? 1t
must have come into his hands in the
course of business"
Ia oir1u CrnanaH eve gods III IL
were only Long Island, or even Pike
county! The sorriest, out-at-elbow,
mosquito-stung old
rock-farm there would bring decent
sum. But Virginia! The place where
the dialect stories grow. The paradise
of the Jim-crow car and the hook
worm. where landpoor, clay-colored
colonels with COATES sit in green
wicker lawn-chairs and watch their
shadows 20 round the house, while
they grzzle mint-juleps and cuss at lazy
'cullud pussons' Where everybody Is
an F. F. V. and everybody's grand
father was a patroon, or whatever
they call 'em, and had a thousand
slaves 'befoh de wah'!"
Who ever heard of Virginia nova
days, except as place people came
from? The principal event in the his
tory of the state since the civil war
had been the discovery of New York.
Its men had moved upon the latter en-
masse. coming with the halo about
them of the old southern names and
legends of planter hospitality-and had
married northern women, till the an
in the marriage column
that the fathers Of bride and bride
groom had fought in opposing armies
at the battle Of Manassas had grown
as hackneyed as the sterotyped
"Whither are we drifting?" editorial.
But was Virginia herself anything
more, in this twentieth. century. than
a hot-blooded, high-handed, prodigal
legend, kept alive in the north by the
banuuets of Southern societies" and
annual poems on "The Lost Cause?
He picked up the newspaper clip
ping. It was worn and broken in the
folds as if it had been carried for
months in a pocketbook.
"It will interest readers of this sec
ton of Virginia (the paragraph began)
to learn, from recent transfer rece1v-
ed for record at the county clerks Of
fee, that Damory court has passed to
Mr.. John Valiant, minor" =.
He turned the paper over and found
a date: it had been printed in the year
of the transfer to himself, when he was
six years old-the year his father had
died.
John Valiant, minor, the son OF
the former owner.
There are few indeed who do not
recall the tragedy with which in the
public mind the estate is connected.
The fact. moreover. that this old home
stead has been left in its present state
(for, as is we'll known, the house has
remained with all it's contents and
untouched) to rest during
so long term Of years unoccupied,
could not, of course, fail to be COM
mented on, and this circumstance
alone has perhaps tended to keep
alive a melancholy story which may
we'll be forgotten"
He read the elaborate, rather stilted
in the twenty-year-old
paper with wondering interest. "An
old house." he unused, with a bad
name Probably he couldn't sell it, and
maybe nobody would ever live in it.