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advanced arthritis, which made getting around on his own difficult. He frequently traveled in a wheelchair as the condition worsened. He took copious amounts of Bromo-Seltzer for his stomach, which caused, according to Dr. Pascal, acetanilide poisoning. He suffered from anemia and heart disease. For several years he included stops in Lake Placid, New York, on his regular circuit between Miami and Round Hill, seeking rest and treatment at the Lake Placid Club. He was there in June 8, 1936, when he died. He was sixty-seven years old. The coroner listed the cause of death as myocardial failure.

The Colonel was transported back to New Bedford, where a procession of local dignitaries followed him out to Round Hill for the funeral services. But Ned was not to be buried at his beloved Round Hill. Shortly after the funeral, Ned, the lover of trains, took his final ride up into the hills of Vermont. Although he had little personal connection with Bellows Falls, he was taken up to join his mother and father in the cemetery of the Episcopal church.

For the Greens, money and litigation always went hand in hand, and Ned’s death prompted two spectacular court cases. In the first, Mabel tried to invalidate the prenuptial agreement she had signed forswearing any claim on the fortune. She tried to prove that the Colonel had been predominantly a resident of Texas, which had one of the nation’s strongest community property laws. She wanted half of Ned’s estate. But Ned had signed his will in 1908, when his mother was still alive. He left everything to Hetty and, should Hetty be dead, to his sister. The fact that he had not felt compelled to update it during the remaining twenty-eight years of his life speaks to the closed circle that the family fortune had become. The fortune must stay in the immediate family. He would not violate that trust. Mabel hired a prominent Philadelphia law firm to handle her case. But she was outgunned by an opponent—Sylvia—who had more money, more lawyers, and who had spent much of her formative life in courtrooms observing her mother in action. For Sylvia, the idea of sharing the fortune with Mabel was untenable. She felt, as keenly as her brother, the importance of keeping the money within the nuclear family, even if that number had now dwindled down to one lonely widow of sixty-five. She was prepared to do whatever she had to do, even if it meant calling up private details from her brother’s life.

Sylvia’s lawyers traveled to Texas to dig up dirt on Mabel, which, by implication, involved digging up dirt on Ned. They paid a call on a man named Dan Quill, the son of Ned’s early secretary at the Texas Midland. The elder Quill had written an unpublished memoir allegedly detailing wild times in Terrell in Ned’s early days there. On September 30, 1936, Dan Quill wrote a letter to Mabel in Port Henry, New York, where she was staying. Quill promised Mabel that he had not shown the memoir to the lawyers, but he had contacted New York agents about the possibility of publishing it. He would, of course, withhold publication should he find some other means by which to take care of his aging mother. “I wish to sincerely state there is no disposition on the part of the Quill family to in any way injure your cause of action in the Courts, and you have our assurance that nothing will be done in this matter until advice is received from you.” It is not known how Mabel responded to this unctuous letter, or if she responded at all. In any case, Sylvia hardly needed Mr. Quill’s memoirs to prevail. Ned’s will was sound, as was the prenuptial agreement Mabel had signed. In the end, more than a year of litigation resulted in a settlement in which Sylvia, gritting her teeth, agreed to pay Mabel a nuisance settlement of $500,000 to get rid of her. Mabel went off to live on Long Island, not so wealthy as she hoped but wealthy enough to live out her once riotous life in comfort.

The second court case developed as a battle among four states—New York, Texas, Florida, and Massachusetts—over estate taxes. Each of the four states sought