The Man Who Tricked the Devil
Jonathan Moulton was a colonial American who began the American Revolution as a colonel in the New Hampshire Militia and served as a brigadier general when the conflict was over. When not fighting, Moulton was a wildly successful businessman who gained a bad reputation for his ruthlessness and tendency to coerce, cajole, or threaten people into doing what he wanted. Naturally, his business practices brought him the ridicule of many of his neighbors and the reproach of being a man who traded his soul for limitless riches.
The story has it that before he gave his soul to the Prince of Darkness in exchange for two boots' worth of gold, Moulton was a poor frontier trader. But Moulton, ever the cunning one, even discovered a way to trick the devil by making holes in the floor of his home and the soles of his footwear. Therefore, the boots didn't fill up until Moulton's cellar was filled with coins, despite the devil continuing to throw gold into them.
One of Moulton's pallbearers claimed that just before he was to be buried, his body had mysteriously vanished from the interior of the coffin. There was a bag of coins in his place, indicating that the devil was prepared to make good on his end of the bargain.
