"This is the place, sir. Come in! Your victim would see you before he dies," the woman said in a deep voice that made a chill run through every nerve, at the same time that she looked him sternly and with an expression of malignant triumph in the face.
Unable to resist the impulse that drove him onward, the rum-seller entered the house.
"See there, sir! Look! Behold the work of your own hands!" exclaimed the woman with startling emphasis, as he found himself in a room, with a few old rags in one corner of it for a bed, upon which lay, in the last sad agonies of dissolution, his old customer, Bill Riley, who, he had been that day informed by his bar-keeper, had joined the temperance society.
"There, sir! See there!" she continued, grasping his arm, and dragging him up to where the miserable wretch lay. "Look at him!—Bill—Bill!" she continued, stooping down, while she still held tightly the rum-seller's arm, and shaking the dying man. "Bill—Bill! Here he is. You said you wanted to see him! Now curse him, Bill! Curse him with your dying breath!" And the woman's voice rose to a wild shriek.
The wretch, thus rudely and suddenly called back from the brink of death into a painful consciousness of existence, half rose up, and stared wildly around him for a moment or two.
"Here he is, Bill! Here he is!" resumed his wife, again shaking him violently.
"Who? Who?" inquired the dying man.
"Why, the rum-seller, who robbed you of your hard earnings, that he might roll in wealth and feast daily on luxuries, while your wife and children were starving! Here he is. Curse him now, with your dying breath! Curse him, I say, Bill Riley! Curse him!"
"Who? Who?" eagerly asked the wretched being, a thrill of new life seeming to flash through his exhausted frame—"Old Graves? Where is he?"
"Here he is, Bill! Here he is! Don't you see him?"