"See here, now!" cried Death. "You two are starting it all over again. I won't have it, so I won't! You aren't fair to Murtrie, and you aren't fair to me! This matter has got to be settled, and settled to-night!"
"Well, then," said God, "settle it. I've ceased to care one way or another."
"I will not," said Death, "I know my job, and I stick to my job. One of you two has got to settle it."
"Toss a coin," suggested the Devil, indifferently.
"There's a qu-qu-quarter in m-m-my t-t-trousers' p-p-pocket," stammered Old Man Murtrie, and then stuck his head under the bedclothes and shivered as if he had the ague.
Death picked up Murtrie's poor little weazened trousers from the floor at the foot of the cot, where they lay sprawled untidily, and shook them till the quarter dropped out.
"Heads, he goes to Heaven. Tails, he goes to Hell," said Death, and tossed the coin to the ceiling. Murtrie heard it hit the ceiling, and started. He heard it hit the floor, and bounce, and jingle and spin and roll and come to rest. And he thrust his head deeper under the covers and lay there quaking. He did not dare look.
"Oh! Oh! Oh!" groaned Murtrie, shaking the cot.
But Death reached over and caught him by the neck and turned his face so that he could not help seeing. And Old Man Murtrie looked and saw that the coin had fallen with the side up that sent him to----
But, really, why should I tell you? Go and worry about your own soul, and let Old Man Murtrie's alone.
But how? In what manner? By what method? Mr. Gooley lay on his bed and thought--or tried to think. The pain in his head, which had been there ever since the day after he had last eaten, prevented easy and coherent thought.
It had been three days ago that the pain left his stomach and went into his head. Hunger had become a cerebral thing, he told himself. His body had felt hunger so long that it refused to feel it any longer; it had shifted the burden to his brain.
"It has passed the buck to my mind, my stomach has," murmured Mr. Gooley feebly. And the mind, less by the process of coherent and connected thought than by a sudden impulsive pounce, had grasped the idea of suicide.
"Not with a knife," considered Mr. Gooley. He had no knife. He had no money to buy a knife. He had no strength to go down the three flights of stairs in the cheap Brooklyn lodging house where he lay, and borrow a knife from the landlady who came and went vaguely in the nether regions, dim and damp and dismal.