“I don’t know. You’ve got no fever, but your heart is jumpy. I guess--Well, you’re getting along, you know. If this pain is what you say, it’s just the beginning of one of those ailments that come on old men sometimes. Nothing I can do for it at your age.” “It’s a-killing me,” Jed pleaded weakly, and the doctor said: “Well, I can physic you, of course; but if it’s just a stomach-ache, it will stop anyway, and if it’s something worse, physic won’t do a bit of good.” “This ain’t no stummick-ache,” said Jed and groaned again. The doctor nodded, and he and ’Miah went out of the room together. ’Miah took this chance to ask: “How about it, Doc?” “May be bad,” the doctor told him. “Looks like the beginning of one of those torturing deaths that some men die. Months, maybe years, of that pain, getting worse all the time. And--his heart is bad.” “He’ll maybe die?” “Might go any time,” said Doctor Crapo, and drove away. Now, this was in 1883. Chet McAusland had recorded the first appearance of that pain in the old note-book that I still held in my hand. The effect of Jed’s artifice was that ’Miah did not, after all, desert his brother. Actuated by the avaricious thought that since he had endured three years of servitude for no return, he might as well endure another period, now that the reward was in sight, he stayed on at the little hillside farm. The next spring he died and was laid away. Old Jed had read his brother well; he grinned to himself because he had been able to buy ’Miah’s services with empty promises and nothing more, and the incident gave him confidence. He lived for a few months alone. III But in 1885 Jed’s native sloth rebelled at the necessity for tending his own bodily needs, and he sent for his sister Abigail, who lived with Deborah on their father’s farm--sent for Abbie, and showed her, as he had showed ’Miah, that tin box of ugly treasure-trove. “I’m a-getting feeble, Abbie,” he told her, plaintively. “I’m too old to do for myself.” With some inward appreciation of the satiric drama of the situation, he parroted the phrases he had used to ’Miah four years before. “I could hire somebody, but that don’t look right. What I got ought to stay in the family. You come and take care of me.” This spinster sister was a humble little woman without strength or assertiveness; she yielded not from greed, but from lack of strength to resist his insistence, and so came to the farm upon the hill. Chet, telling the story, struck his fist upon his knee at the recollection. “There’s nobody knows what he put her through, and Deborah after her,” he told me. “That old heathen had to have his own way or he’d raise holy Ned; and he got it. Abbie stood it longer than ’Miah; she never did kick up and threaten to leave him. But after two years she took sick and discouraged-like, and wanted to quit and go home. Then Jed he begun to say again how sick he was; made her fetch the doctor again.”