And at twenty past ten in the morning on the eleventh of June he walked into First National in Denver with his driving licence and his birth certificate and asked for the trust administration department, and I sat in the waiting area and read a brochure about retirement products for fifty minutes.

The trust terminated by its own terms on the tenth.

The instrument did that; nobody had to do anything and nobody could have stopped it.

What he did not get was the money.

There was an order on the file from the eleventh of April requiring the trustees to render a full accounting before any final distribution, which is standard when a removal petition is pending, and the effect of it was that eight hundred and seventy-one thousand four hundred dollars moved out of a trust account and into a court-supervised account where neither he nor anybody else could touch a dollar of it.

It stayed there until the second of September.