“Back to my breakfast. I'll not be called out for nothing by you or any other man after I've been out all night. If you want a gossip, get the parson; he's got time enough on his hands. A man don't have to work so many hours a day saving souls as he does saving bodies.”
Lot laughed. “And neither souls nor bodies saved by either of you, after all,” said he, “for the Lord saves the one, if he has so ordained it; and as for the other, your nostrums only work so long as death does not choose to come.”
“Have it your own way; save your own soul and your own body, as ye please, for all me,” said the doctor, who was adjudged capable when crossed of being surly to a dying man; and he made for the door.
“For God's sake stop,” cried Lot, “and come back here and listen! I did not call you for nothing. The lives and deaths of more than one are at stake; come back here!”
The doctor clamped his medicine-chest hard on the floor. “Be quick about it, then,” said he, and sat down in a chair at Lot's bedside.
Lot fumbled under his pillow and produced a folded paper which he handed to the doctor. “I want you to sign this,” said he.
The doctor scowled over the paper, got out his iron-bowed spectacles, adjusted them, and read aloud:
“I, Justinus Emmons, practising doctor of medicine, do hereby declare that the death of Lot Gordon of Ware Centre will, when it takes place, be due to phthisis, and phthisis alone, and not in any degree, however small, to the wound inflicted by himself some months since. And, furthermore, I declare that his death will follow from the natural progress of the disease of phthisis, which has not in any respect been accelerated by his self-inflicted wound.”
“You want me to sign this, do you?” said the doctor.
“I will call in Margaret Bean and her husband for witnesses,” said Lot.