Wegg's plan was not to demand the money until he had fully searched all the dust mounds. Mr. Boffin spurred Wegg on in this regard by making him read to him in the evenings from a book called The Lives of Famous Misers which he had bought: about the famous Mr. Dancer who had warmed his dinner by sitting on it and died naked in a sack, and yet had gold and bank-notes hidden in the crevices of the walls and in cracked jugs and tea-pots; of an old apple woman in whose house a fortune was found wrapped up in little scraps of paper; of "Vulture Hopkins" and "Blewbury Jones" and many others whose riches after their death were found hidden in strange places. While Wegg read, Mr. Boffin would pretend to get tremendously excited about his dust mounds, so that Wegg grew surer and surer there must be riches hidden in them.
Finally The Golden Dustman sold the mounds and had them carted away little by little, Wegg watching every shovelful for fear he would miss something.
Mr. Boffin hired a foreman to manage the removal of the dust who wore Wegg down to skin and bone. He worked by daylight and torchlight, too. Just as Wegg, tired out by watching all day in the rain, would crawl into bed, the foreman, like a goblin, would reappear and go to work again. Sometimes Wegg would be waked in the middle of the night, and sometimes kept at his post for as much as forty-eight hours at a stretch, till he grew so gaunt and haggard that even his wooden leg looked chubby in comparison.
At last he could not keep quiet any longer and he told Mr. Boffin what he had found. Mr. Boffin pretended the most abject dread. Wegg bullied and browbeat him to his heart's content, and ended by ordering him, like a slave, to be ready to receive him on a certain morning, and to have the money ready to pay him.
When he went to the fine Boffin house to keep this appointment he entered insolently, whistling and with his hat on. A servant showed him into the library where Mr. Boffin and the secretary sat waiting, and where the secretary at once astonished him by taking off the hat and throwing it out of the window.
In another moment Wegg found himself seized by the cravat, shaken till his teeth rattled, and pinned in a corner of the room, where the secretary knocked his head against the wall while he told him in a few words what a scoundrel he was.
When he learned that the will he had discovered was worthless paper, Wegg lost all his bullying air and cringed before them. Mr. Boffin was disposed to be merciful and offered to make good his loss of his ballad business, but Wegg, grasping and mean to the last, set its value at such a ridiculously high figure that Mr. Boffin put his money back into his pocket.
Then, at a sign from John Rokesmith, one of the servants caught Wegg by the collar, hoisted him on his back, ran down to the street with him and threw him into a garbage cart, where he disappeared from view with a tremendous splash.
And that, so far as this story is concerned, was the end of Silas Wegg.