“Mrs. Achorn is, probably, a good and well-meaning woman, Sum, I have no doubt; but if I were you I wouldn’t let any one scare me into conniptions. It doesn’t pay.”
“I know what I’m talkin’ about,” persisted Badger. “I want to make my will.”
“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t,” the Squire replied, and he pulled a long sheet of paper from the drawer.
“I allus like to know prices before I buy. What will sech a dockyment cost me?”
Sumner Badger was known widely as the “closest figgerer” in Palermo. He often boasted that he had never been extravagant in his life except once when he bought five cents’ worth of peppermint-drops for a girl. He was young then, he said.
“She set and et the whole mess right down, one after the other,” he frequently related, “and that fixed me with her. I wouldn’t have no sech extravagance as that in a wife and so she lost her chance. I went and got me a woman that knowed how to make things spend for what they was wuth.” And on their little farm, denying themselves everything except the barest necessities, the couple had amassed their little competence.
The Squire eyed the old man’s sun-faded clothes and his knotted hands and his seamed, gaunt face, yellow with bile, and he pitied this slave who had half-starved himself, in the midst of his herds and his harvests.
“Poor old gaffer, you’ve sold your cream all along and drunk the skim milk,” he reflected—“a life ordeal worse than Tantalus went through, for Tantalus couldn’t reach what he was hungry for, and all you have had to do was to stick out your hand and dip into bounty.”
He looked long at Badger, his shrewd eyes twinkling with the humour that replaced his momentary pity. Then he answered the old man’s question.
“I’m willing to be reasonable, Sum. Now, what would you say was a fair price for drawing a will?”