The Ill-Gotten Deed

Calvin Jr. comes barreling into the library at Whit's End in a temper, hunting for a book of mean tricks to play on his brother. Ronnie has cheated him again. Their mother promised a dollar to whichever boy cleaned his side of their shared room first, and when Calvin finished and ran to fetch her, Ronnie shoved all his junk under Calvin's bed. John Avery Whittaker doesn't have a book of mean tricks, but he does have one he wrote himself, a true story called The Ill-Gotten Deed, and he sits down to read it aloud.

The story begins in Richmond, Virginia, in the early 1800s, with identical twin brothers named Horace and Grover. They look alike and nothing else. Horace is kind, gentle, a little absent-minded, and happiest outdoors. Grover is clever, shrewd, and citified, and he has spent his whole life pulling fast ones on his brother, who falls for nine out of ten of them. When the twins turn thirty, their father dies, and a lawyer named Ambrose P. Schnook reads them their father's last wishes. The old man owned a piece of land out west, and rather than divide it or choose between his sons, he arranged a race. A man named Silas Van Kreeft lives on the property holding the deed, and he will sign it over to whichever twin reaches him first. Each brother gets a map and a strongbox of money at the bank to outfit a wagon.

Grover knows he will lose an honest race, because Horace and his wife Phoebe understand wagons and he and his wife Rachel do not. So he fetches Horace's birth certificate from a trunk, dresses as his twin, and walks out of the bank with both strongboxes. Horace and Phoebe find the money gone, the lawyer's word useless, and Grover's house stripped bare, with a note left on the mantel that reads, Ha ha. Got you again. Love, Grover.

The trail west is misery for two city people. Rachel endures cold ground, cold lake water, torn clothes and weeks without a hot meal, but they do reach the valley first, and Silas signs the deed over. Then the twist arrives. The valley's name means land that stinks like a swamp. The rainy season floods it most of the year, range cattle churn the rest into mud, and their father, who never once saw the place, bought it from a land speculator. While Grover is still reeling, riders come galloping at the cabin, and Grover has brought no rifle. What saves them is a stampede of cattle driven straight through - and behind it rides Horace.

Grover admits he only wanted to win, and calls his cheating making his own advantages. Horace tells him cheating is cheating whatever you name it, but he came because Grover is still his brother and it is not his place to judge him. Shamed by that kindness, Grover hands over the deed and heads home, and Horace gives him the family farm outright.

The rains come and the valley turns to swamp, exactly as promised. Horace, no dummy about farming, digs irrigation ditches with a few neighbors, dries the land out, and builds a town on it - a town named Odyssey. The brothers' last name, Whit reveals, is McAlister, the same name on the public library, the junior high, and the park where Whit's End stands today. Horace never set out to get even, Whit explains. He simply refused to be overcome by evil, and overcame evil with good instead. Calvin decides to forgive Ronnie, and agrees to give him the book too, though he can't resist adding that if forgiveness fails, he can always brain him with it.