This Jedidiah Grant, so Chet assured me, was by all odds the meanest man that ever dwelt in Fraternity, where to be mean and to be miserly are synonymous.
“Why,” said Chet, “he was so mean he wouldn’t let you see him laugh; fear it ’u’d tickle you.” And he began to chuckle at some recollection, so that it was necessary to spur him before he would go on.
“I was thinking,” he explained, “of the time Jed went down to Boston. Went to turn some gold into greenbacks. This was after the war, when the greenbacks was ’way down. Jed had made some money boot-legging in Bangor, and he see a chance to make some more. Trip didn’t cost him a thing, because a couple of Boston men asked him to come down.”
He had met these men in Bangor, it appeared.
“They ’lowed I uz a side-show,” Jed told Chet. “I knowed they thought so, but long as they paid my way, I didn’t mind. Went along down and did my business at the bank. Then they took me to supper at a tavern and tried to git me drunk; got drunk theirselves. Then we went to a show. Say, Chet, they was the funniest man in that show I ever see. I set between these two, and they kep’ a-looking at me, and I was like to bust, I wanted to laugh so bad. I never did see such a funny man. But I didn’t much as grin; it near killed me. Say, when I got into bed that night, I like’ to died laughing, just thinking about him. But they didn’t know that.”
“I asked him,” Chet explained, “why he didn’t want to laugh in the theater, and he says, ‘I wouldn’t give them two that much satisfaction.’ So he saved it up till he got alone. That’s how mean he was.”
This man had been born in Fraternity, and his brother Nehemiah and his sisters Abigail and Deborah always lived in the town. No one of them was ever to marry. They were dwelling together in the house where their father and mother had lived when Jed came back to Fraternity and settled down to a business in usury, lending out money on iron-clad notes, and collecting on the nail. He was a timorous man, forever fearful lest by force or by stealth he be robbed of the tin box of paper that represented his fortune; therefore he hid the box ingeniously, sharing the secret with no living man.
Jed was already old, and his sixtieth birthday came in 1881. He had bought a little hillside farm, where he lived alone; but in that year his loneliness became oppressive to him, and he sought out his brother ’Miah with a proposal that he had carefully planned.
Before ’Miah’s eyes old Jed spread out all the kingdoms of the world. That is to say, he showed his brother the tin box of notes, showed all his wealth to the other man. He was worth at this time twenty thousand dollars, a fortune in Fraternity.
“It’s this a-way, ’Miah,” he explained. “I’m a-getting old, and mighty feeble sometimes. Can’t do for myself like I used. I could hire somebody to take care of me, but that don’t look just right. Seems like what I got ought to stay in the family, ’Miah. Don’t it look that way to you?”