There Is A Reaper ... There Is A Reaper ... By Charles V. De Vet Doctors had given him just one month to live. A month to wonder, what comes afterward? There was one way to find out—ask a dead man! Doctors had given him just one month to live. A month to wonder, what comes afterward? There was one way to find out—ask a dead man! The amber brown of the liquor disguised the poison it held, and I watched with a smile on my lips as he drank it. There was no pity in my heart for him. He was a jackal in the jungle of life, and I ... I was one of the carnivores. It is the lot of the jackals of life to be devoured by the carnivore. The Suddenly the contented look on his face froze into a startled stillness. I knew he was feeling the first savage twinge of the agony that was to come. He turned his head and looked at me, and I saw suddenly that he knew what I had done. "You murderer!" he cursed me, and then his body arched in the middle and his voice choked off deep in his throat. For a short minute he sat, tense, his body stiffened by the agony that rode it—unable to move a muscle. I watched the torment in his eyes build up to a crescendo of pain, until the suffering became so great that it filmed his eyes, and I knew that, though he still stared directly at me, he no longer saw me. Then, as suddenly as the spasm had come, the starch went out of his body and his back slid slowly down the chair edge. He landed heavily with his head resting limply against the seat of the chair. His right leg doubled up in a kind of jerk, before he was still. I knew the time had come. "Where are you?" I asked. This moment had cost me sixty thousand dollars. Three weeks ago the best doctors in the state had given me a month to live. And with seven million dollars in the bank I couldn't buy a minute more. I accepted the doctors' decision philosophically, like the gambler that I am. But I had a plan: One which necessity had never forced me to use until now. Several years before I had read an
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