the devil as a usurer, someone who lends money at interest—often very high rates of interest at that.

Before long, Tom has become a fantastically wealthy individual with more money than he knows what to do with. As well as gaining all this money, however, Tom has earned an unenviable reputation as a miserly businessman who will stop at nothing to get his own way. In short, Tom acts exactly the way one would expect a man who has sold his soul to the devil to behave.

Yet for all his astonishing wealth, Tom is never happy with his life—he can't help fretting over the prospect of his soul being sent to the raging fires of hell. Even so, he doesn't change his ways, apart from making a hypocritical outward show of Christian piety; he still carries on with his brutal business practices as before, amassing even greater sums of money and ensuring that, when the time comes, he will end up being dragged to hell by the devil.

When Tom Walker is taken by the black horseman, it is generally assumed that he is a rich man, though the narrator has already warned the reader that Tom's grand house and fine carriage are mere ostentation, since he is too miserly to furnish the house or feed the carriage horses.

In line with this hint from the narrator, when trustees are appointed to take charge of Tom's wealth, they find there is nothing for them to do. Tom's bonds and mortgages are all "reduced to cinders," and the iron chest that was supposed to be full of gold and silver contains nothing but wood "chips and shavings." They find only the skeletons of horses in his stable, and the great house Tom built quickly burns to the ground. Irving writes:

Such was the end of Tom Walker and his ill gotten wealth. Let all griping money brokers lay this story to heart.

As is usual with Irving, multiple interpretations are possible. It seems likely that the devil caused all of Tom's wealth to deteriorate into valueless detritus as he took its owner away. However, when he was alive, Tom was already starving his horses and perhaps pretending to be wealthier than he really was. In either case, none of Tom's fabled wealth survives his death, and he leaves behind nothing but a legend and, as the narrator points out, a warning.