“No! No! I have everything planned, and I have it written down so that you can do it just as I wish. I’ll pay you now for your trouble,” and he handed the Doctor a fifty-dollar bill. “Promise me that you will do it,” he pleaded.
Dr. Jackson, thinking it all to be nonsense, nevertheless promised, and the miser slowly hobbled off.
The Doctor thought it all a good joke, and the news soon spread about the village.
“And to think,” the Doctor said to a group of men standing in front of the little drug store, “the old tight-wad gave me this fifty to see that his fool notions were carried out,” and he showed them the bill.
The old man was the object of a great many jokes during the ensuing weeks, but he himself was feeling much more at ease to think that the Doctor had pledged himself to carry out his wishes.
The miser’s right leg, however, was growing more and more numb. Each morning he would pinch it to see if there were any feeling left. It became very difficult for him to walk; so he decided to supervise, personally, the erection of the bell.
It was a large iron one much like the ordinary farmhouse dinner bell which the rural housewife uses to notify the men in the field that dinner is ready. The old man had it fastened on a post, which was set in the ground near the spot which he had chosen for his grave.
The time finally came when the shriveled figure of the miser did not appear upon the street, and investigation revealed him lying upon his bed, almost wholly paralyzed. Doctor Jackson obtained one of the middle-aged women of the village to wait upon him, and give him his food, for he could not even move his arms to feed himself. For a few weeks more he lay in this helpless condition gradually becoming more and more dependent upon his nurse. One morning he failed to open his eyes, and lay motionless, giving no sign of life whatever. Dr. Jackson had a great number of calls to make that day, and so it was not until late in the evening that he could attend the old fellow. Tired out from his labors, the doctor made a hasty examination, and said there was no doubt about his being dead.
Next day the Doctor gave the miser’s written instructions to his man-of-all-work, and told him to see that they were fulfilled. The latter had a hole bored in the lid of the coffin, through which the rope was to pass. One end of it was placed in the hand of the corpse, and the remainder of the rope was pushed through a one-inch pipe, and fastened to the bell. The pipe permitted the rope to be pulled easily; otherwise the earth would have checked it. According to the miser’s orders, another tube connected the cheap casket with the open air. This was to permit him to breathe if he should not be entirely dead.
The earth was rapidly shoveled into the opening, and in a short time a mound of yellow clay marked the old skinflint’s last abode. It was unlike other newly-made graves, however, for a rope reached out of it to the bell near by, and six inches of an air-pipe protruded.