This time, it appeared, Doctor Crapo had been wholly convinced of the miser’s honesty. “A pain like that,” he told Jed, “is always a sure sign. I’ve seen them go. Specially men that eat heavy, like you do, and that get fat as they go along. You’re going to have that pain the rest of your life, and worse all the time.” Abbie was in the room, and Jed asked plaintively: “Hev I got to suffer like this here for days and days, Doc?” “Months, maybe years,” said the doctor, implacably. Jed shook his head, turned wearily toward the wall. “It ain’t a-going to be that long,” he assured them. “I can’t stand it so long as you say.” Before this pitiable resignation, Abbie had neither the courage nor the selfishness to leave her brother alone; so she struggled on, tending the dying man. But five years later he was still alive, as venomous and as slothful as he had ever been, when Abigail at last gave way. She suffered what would have passed as a nervous breakdown in a woman of more sheltered life, and needed Jed’s care far more than he needed hers. When she would have taken to her bed, however, Jed kept stubbornly to his, so that she drove herself meekly to her round of tasks, and wept with the agony of tight-wrung nerves. It was release when, in the following spring, she died. Jed grinned at the fact that her years of service had brought her no reward at all, and the day after the funeral he sent for Deborah. IV “By that time,” Chet assured me, “everybody in town knowed about Uncle Jed and this pain of his, and from now on he talked about it more. You stop to see him any day, and he’d groan and take on in a way that ’u’d surprise you. He stayed in bed all the time, in a room all shut up tight, reading his papers and drinking his gin and eating all the time. Deborah took good care of him; she was that kind of a woman. She had backbone, but she was built to take care of folks, and half the town had had her in when folks was sick. There was times when she threatened to leave him, but she never did, him always saying he was about to die.” There were skeptics, it appeared. Doctor Crapo himself was at last beginning to suspect the old miser’s play-acting. “If he’d had that pain all this time,” he told Deborah, “he’d be howling with it night and day or dead long ago. He’s a lazy hound; that’s all, Miss Grant.” But Deborah would not altogether be convinced, and when Jed heard the doctor’s words, he wagged his head and said pathetically: “That’s what I git for bearing it so brave’. If I’d yell and take on, you’d believe me; but because I keep my mouth shut and stand these torments, you think I’m lying.”