As boys the two fellows had come from the old country, one from Scotland and the other from England, to make their fortune in America during the mid 1800s. Upon their arrival they had sworn a solemn pact between them of everlasting fellowship. Moreover, they had committed their pact to writing, with the added provision that their worldly goods should pass to the other, in the event one of them should die.
For the next several decades the two traveled throughout the west together, engaging in various professions and adventures. Eventually, they took to prospecting and for the last twenty years had lived as mountain-men high in the Rockies. Time and solitude had worked on both, and now, as old men, each longed simply to outlive the other and thereby come into possession of his money.
One day the Scotsman, while breakfasting alone in his cabin, recalled that he had not seen his companion for several days. He immediately walked the distance to the other's cabin, where he found the Englishman in his bed, pale and sick.
"Ay, you look awful," said the Scot, barely managing to maintain his dignity and suppress a smile. "Would ye like a wee bit of breakfast?"
"No," said the Englishman, as he coughed, with the death rattle in his throat, "I'm done for."
"Have ye remembered the pact," asked the Scot.
"What?"
"The pact, man, that pact which we swore between us sixty years ago."
"Alas," replied the Englishman, "that pact will do neither of us any good now. I'm ashamed to say that I spend all the money over the years on fast living and sin, and I've nothing left at the end of my life."
Whereupon, the Scot flew into a rage and went on in a disgraceful way about the black-hearted Englishman, the treachery of it all, and other vile remarks as befitted the occasion. While thus engaged he stopped, clasped his heart, and fell dead.
His companion pulled himself out of bed, stood beside the body with a satisfied look, and proclaimed aloud,
"I knew that would finish the miser ..."
---------------A Final Thought ...
"Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), U.S. author