“Curse your money!” he cried, pretending to spit the insult from his mouth. “Curse your money; but if I was you, and a weel-kent skipper like Dan Risk--like Dan Risk of the _Seven Sisters_--made up to me out of a redeeculous good nature and nothing else, I would gladly go and splice the rope with him in the nearest ken.” “Go and drink with yourself, man,” I cried; “there's the money for a chappin of ate, and I'll forego my share of it.” I could have done nothing better calculated to infuriate him. As I held out the coin on the palm of my hand he struck it up with an oath and it rolled into the syver. His face flamed till the neck of him seemed a round of seasoned beef. “By the Rock o' Bass!” he roared, “I would clap ye in jyle for less than your lousy groat.” Ah, then, it was in vain I had put the breadth of Scotland between me and that corpse among the rushes: my heart struggled a moment, and sank as if it had been drowned in bilge. I turned on the man what must have been a gallows face, and he laughed, and, gaining his drunken good nature again he hooked me by the arm, and before my senses were my own again he was leading me down the street and to the harbour. I had never a word to say. The port, as I tell, was swathed in the haar of the east, out of which tall masts rose dim like phantom spears; the clumsy tarred bulwarks loomed like walls along the quay, and the neighbourhood was noisy with voices that seemed unnatural coming out of the haze. Mariners were hanging about the sheds, and a low tavern belched others out to keep them company. Risk made for the tavern, and at that I baulked. “Oh, come on!” said he. “If I'm no' mistaken Dan Risk's the very man ye're in the need of. You're wanting out of Scotland, are ye no'?” “More than that; I'm wanting out of myself,” said I, but that seemed beyond him. “Come in anyway, and we'll talk it over.” That he might help me out of the country seemed possible if he was not, as I feared at first, some agent of the law and merely playing with me, so I entered the tavern with him. “Two gills to the coffin-room, Mrs. Clerihew,” he cried to the woman in the kitchen. “And slippy aboot it, if ye please, for my mate here's been drinking buttermilk all his life, and ye can tell't in his face.” “I would rather have some meat,” said I. “Humph!” quo' he, looking at my breeches. “A lang ride!” He ordered the food at my mentioning, and made no fuss about drinking my share of the spirits as well as his own, while I ate with a hunger that was soon appeased, for my eye, as the saying goes, was iller to satisfy than my appetite. He sat on the other side of the table in the little room that doubtless fairly deserved the name it got of coffin, for many a man, I'm thinking, was buried there in his evil habits; and I wondered what was to be next.