Heir To Million Dollars Still Works As Farm Hand

1920

There Is Plenty of Time When Haying Is Over to Think About the Big Fortune That Has Been Seeking Him Seven Years, Says Wealthy "Hired Man."

BOSTON, Mass. — One of the favorite plots of the novelist has become once more a fact. Romance, scoffed at and belittled by sceptics, has come into its own again, and with a vengeance. It has reached its magic wand down into the sweet-scented hayfields at Boylston, Mass., and touched — well.

His name is the most ordinary sort of name in the world, David Nicoll Cant, a Scotch name, as a matter of fact.

His brow is furrowed with healthy wrinkles, not of age, even tho he is close to 47 years old, but with the wrinkles of the weather of long years' toil under the sun in the open.

And this man, who has been wielding a pitchfork and lugging milk pails in from Stark's barn and doing up the chores for the past nine years, has suddenly become a millionaire. Just over night, as it were, as Lord Byron, who woke up and found himself famous, so Dave Cant woke up one morning a few days ago; and he has been pinching himself ever since to see if it's really true.

Wanderer for Twenty Years.

David Nicoll Cant, farm hand, wanderer over the face of the earth for nearly a score of years, left his home, his brothers and sisters and parents with but a five-pound note in his pocket and the blessing of his home circle. He had been educated in the best schools of Dundee, Scotland, but he was the younger son, and he had come to despise the job of clerking in a commercial house, where his father had placed him.

For a few years he wandered about New England, keeping in touch with his family by means of an occasional letter. Then, thirteen years ago, all communication ceased. He dropped from sight, and when his father died, six years afterwards, all efforts on the part of his family to find him availed nothing. His sister Isabelle, however, didn't give up hope. She held to the opinion that David could he found, even when the lawyers advising the heirs were frank in their scepticism of ever locating him.

This year, seven years after the death of the father, she determined to make one more attempt, and accordingly notices were sent to several New England newspapers by Choate, Hall & Stewart, a Boston law firm, seeking the whereabouts of David Nicoll Cant.

He'll Wait Till Haying's Over.

Up in Boylston a farmer's wife saw the notice in a Worcester paper. She called up Mrs. Stark, where Cant was employed, and called her attention to the similarity of the names. Dave's employer got busy, with the result that within another twenty-hour hours David Nicoll Cant was proven to be the long-sought son, and was informed that he was now able to take off his overalls whenever he wanted to, to drop his hay fork and forget the milking of cows. For the fortune to which he is an heir amounts to $2,000,000.

Only David isn't that kind. He merely nodded and smiled a shrewd smile, did David. Money doesn't worry him, not by a good deal. He just stuck to that haying job, and said that when the last haycock was off the fields, and the last loft had been tramped, and the "things were straightened up a bit, along of next month, he'd look into the matter," and think about returning to Scotland to claim his inheritance.

So there he is today, wielding his hay fork with the deftness of the expert, probably the most wealthy hired man at work in Massachusetts.

—The Saturday Blade, Chicago, Aug. 7, 1920, p. 4.