into a fever
of excitement. The Mammon Hill _Patriot_, whose editor had been a
leading spirit in the proceedings that resulted in Gilson's departure
from New Jerusalem, published a most complimentary obituary notice of
the deceased, and was good enough to call attention to the fact that his
degraded contemporary, the Squaw Gulch _Clarion_, was bringing virtue
into contempt by beslavering with flattery the memory of one who in life
had spurned the vile sheet as a nuisance from his door. Undeterred by
the press, however, claimants under the will were not slow in presenting
themselves with their evidence; and great as was the Gilson estate it
appeared conspicuously paltry considering the vast number of sluice
boxes from which it was averred to have been obtained. The country rose
as one man!

Mr. Brentshaw was equal to the emergency. With a shrewd application of
humble auxiliary devices, he at once erected above the bones of his
benefactor a costly monument, overtopping every rough headboard in the
cemetery, and on this he judiciously caused to be inscribed an epitaph
of his own composing, eulogizing the honesty, public spirit and cognate
virtues of him who slept beneath, "a victim to the unjust aspersions of
Slander's viper brood."

Moreover, he employed the best legal talent in the Territory to defend
the memory of his departed friend, and for five long years the
Territorial courts were occupied with litigation growing out of the
Gilson bequest. To fine forensic abilities Mr. Brentshaw opposed
abilities more finely forensic; in bidding for purchasable favors he
offered prices which utterly deranged the market; the judges found at
his hospitable board entertainment for man and beast, the like of which
had never been spread in the Territory; with mendacious witnesses he
confronted witnesses of superior mendacity.

Nor was the battle confined to the temple of the blind goddess--it
invaded the press, the pulpit, the drawing-room. It raged in the mart,
the exchange, the school; in the gulches, and on the street corners. And
upon the last day of the memorable period to which legal action under
the Gilson will was limited, the sun went down upon a region in which
the moral sense was dead, the social conscience callous, the
intellectual capacity dwarfed, enfeebled, and confused! But Mr.
Brentshaw was victorious all along the line.

On that night it so happened that the cemetery in one corner of which
lay the now honored ash