“Oh, my lord,” cried the ghost, “think what you’ll suffer in the morning.”
“That for the morning,” cried the tiger, whisking its tail—“I tell you, Jacob, I intend to make a night of it. Slave, lead on.”
And thus for three months, conducted by the fate-enforced ghost, did the tiger continue to sup off Vandervermins. Uncles and aunts, cousins male and female, in all eight, had the tiger devoured, when one night the brute carried off the ninth and last victim in the person of Justus Vandervermin, lawyer and usurer. The tiger—strange to say—devoured every bit of him; but it was the brute’s last morsel; it never could digest him. Justus Vandervermin remained, like so much india-rubber, in the vitals of the tiger. Nothing could stir the lawyer.
“Jacob,” cried the brute, feeling its last hour approach. “I shall die, and your ghost will be at rest. I forgive you—but why—why didn’t you tell me that Justus was a lawyer?”
And with these words the tiger died, and the ghost of Jacob Vandervermin was instantly at peace.
“And if all this story isn’t true, Captain”—asked one of the Cat-and-Fiddle company—“what do you get out of it?”
“Why, true or not, this much,” answered Captain Bam; “never to neglect and ill-use a poor relation. For however low and helpless he may seem, the day may come when he shall have about him the strength of a tiger.”
