Doughty took an appeal from the verdict against him, but abandoned the fight later in the spring of 1921, and was sent to prison. Here the unravelling of the Small mystery came to an abrupt end. A year passed, then two years. Still nothing more developed. Doughty was in prison, the police were silent and seemed inactive. Perhaps they had abandoned the hunt. Possibly they knew what had befallen the theater owner and were refraining from making revelations for reasons of public policy. Perhaps, as was hinted in the newspapers, there were persons of influence involved in the mess, persons powerful enough to hush the officials. But the matter of Small’s fortune was still in abeyance, and there were indications of a bitter contest between the wife and Small’s two sisters, who had apparently been hostile for years. This struggle promised to bring out further facts and perhaps to reveal to the public what the family and the officials knew or suspected. Soon after Small had vanished, Mrs. Small had moved formally to protect his property by having a measure introduced into the Dominion Parliament declaring Small an absentee and placing herself and a bank in control of the estate. This measure was soon taken, with the result that the Small fortune, amounting to about two million dollars, net, continued to be profitably administered. Early in 1923, after Doughty had been two years in prison, and all rumor of the kidnapping or disappearance mystery had died down, Mrs. Small appeared in court with a petition to have her husband declared dead, so that she might offer for probate an informal will made on September 6, 1903. This document was written on a single small sheet of paper and devised to Mrs. Small her husband’s entire estate, which was of modest proportions at the time the will was drawn. The court refused to declare the missing magnate dead, saying that insufficient evidence had been presented, and that the police were apparently not satisfied. Mrs. Small next appealed her case, and the reviewing court reversed the decision and declared Small legally dead. Thereupon the widow filed the will of 1903 and was immediately attacked by Small’s sisters, who declared that they had in their possession a will made in 1917, which revoked the earlier testament and disinherited Mrs. Small. This will, if it existed, was never produced.