his head with incorruptible
resolution, walked on.

The stranger, pipe in mouth, rose from his bench, the bottle in one hand,
and the glass in the other, and followed at the sexton's heels, his dusky
horse keeping close in his wake.

There was something suspicious and unaccountable in this importunity.

Bob quickened his pace, but the stranger followed close. The sexton began
to feel queer, and turned about. His pursuer was behind, and still
inviting him with impatient gestures to taste his liquor.

"I told you before," said Bob, who was both angry and frightened, "that I
would not taste it, and that's enough. I don't want to have anything to
say to you or your bottle; and in God's name," he added, more vehemently,
observing that he was approaching still closer, "fall back and don't be
tormenting me this way."

These words, as it seemed, incensed the stranger, for he shook the bottle
with violent menace at Bob Martin; but, notwithstanding this gesture of
defiance, he suffered the distance between them to increase. Bob,
however, beheld him dogging him still in the distance, for his pipe shed
a wonderful red glow, which duskily illuminated his entire figure like
the lurid atmosphere of a meteor.

"I wish the devil had his own, my boy," muttered the excited sexton, "and
I know well enough where you'd be."

The next time he looked over his shoulder, to his dismay he observed the
importunate stranger as close as ever upon his track.

"Confound you," cried the man of skulls and shovels, almost beside
himself with rage and horror, "what is it you want of me?"

The stranger appeared more confident, and kept wagging his head and
extending both glass and bottle toward him as he drew near, and Bob
Martin heard the horse snorting as it followed in the dark.

"Keep it to yourself, whatever it is, for there is neither grace nor
luck about you," cried Bob Martin, freezing with terror; "leave me
alone, will you."

And he fumbled in vain among the seething confusion of his ideas for a
prayer or an exorcism. He quickened his pace almost to a run; he was now
close to his own door, under the impending bank by the river side.

"Let me in, let me in, for God's sake; Molly, open the door," he cried,
as he ran to the threshold, and leant his back against the plank. His
pursuer confronted him upon the road; the pipe was no longer in his
mouth, but the dusky red glow still lingered round him. He uttered some
inarticulate cavernous