His eyes stared straight before him. He seemed to see nothing but the two open doors between which he was vibrating. No one had happened to notice him, or, if so, his movements were taken for the vagaries of intoxication. A nerve of God knows what, in his diseased will began to throb, and he made a leap away from the saloon, and ran heavily towards the white and scarlet lights of the transparency; at the steps, he fell, and lay groveling; he could hear the singing overhead:-- “Ora pro nobis, We lift our souls to thee.” He tried to climb up; but something--call it his muscle, call it his will, call it his soul; it does not signify--something refused him, and he did not get beyond the second stair. Slowly, reluctantly, mysteriously, his feet seemed to be dragged back. He put out his hands, as if to push at an invisible foe; he leaned over backwards, planting his great oiled boots firmly in the ground, as if resisting unseen force; but slowly, reluctantly, mysteriously, he was pulled back. At the steps of the saloon, in a blot of darkness, on the shadowed side, he sank; he got to his hands and knees like an animal, and there he crawled. If any one had been listening, the man might have been heard to sob,-- “It’s me and the rum--God and the devil--Now we’ll see!” He rose more feebly this time, and struggled over toward the prayer-room; he wavered, and turned before he had got there, and made weakly back. Panting heavily, he crawled up the steps of the saloon, and then lurched over, and fell down into the blot whence he had come. There he lay, crying, with the arm of his brown gingham jumper before his eyes. “Look up, Job!” said a low voice in the shadow at his side. Job Slip lifted his sodden face, swollen, red, and stained with tears. Instinctively he stretched up his hands. “Oh, sir!” was all he said. Bayard stood towering above him; he had his grand Saint Michael look, half of scorn and half of pity. Job had not seen his face before since the night when it suddenly rose on a great wave, like that of another drowning man, making towards him in the undertow off Ragged Rock. Job put up his hands, now, before his own face. He told Mari, long afterwards, that the minister blinded him. “Get up!” said Bayard, much in the tone in which he had said it the day he knocked Job down. Job crawled up. “Come here!” said the preacher sternly. He held out his white hand; Job put his wet and fishy palm into it; Bayard drew that through his own arm, and led him away without another word. Old Trawl came muttering to the door, and stood with his hand over his eyes, shutting out the glare of the bar-room within, to watch them. Ben looked over his shoulder, scowling. Father and son muttered unpleasantly together, as the minister and the drunkard moved off, and melted into the fine, dark rain.