“To be sure I am,” says the stranger, with a hoarse chuckle.  “Ah, my dear good man, I bet you will remember the pilgrim many a long year!”

“Why should I remember you?”

“Why I’ve got round you so smartly. . . .  Am I a pilgrim?  I am not a pilgrim at all.”

“What are you then?”

“A dead man. . . .  I’ve only just got out of my coffin. . . .  Do you remember Gubaryev, the locksmith, who hanged himself in carnival week?  Well, I am Gubaryev himself! . . .”

“Tell us something else!”

The watchman does not believe him, but he feels all over such a cold, oppressive terror that he starts off and begins hurriedly feeling for the gate.

“Stop, where are you off to?” says the stranger, clutching him by the arm.  “Aie, aie, aie . . . what a fellow you are!  How can you leave me all alone?”

“Let go!” cries the watchman, trying to pull his arm away.

“Sto-op!  I bid you stop and you stop.  Don’t struggle, you dirty dog!  If you want to stay among the living, stop and hold your tongue till I tell you.  It’s only that I don’t care to spill blood or you would have been a dead man long ago, you scurvy rascal. . . .  Stop!”

The watchman’s knees give way under him.  In his terror he shuts his eyes, and trembling all over huddles close to the wall.  He would like to call out, but he knows his cries would not reach any living thing.  The stranger stands beside him and holds him by the arm. . . .  Three minutes pass in silence.

“One’s in a fever, another’s asleep, and the third is seeing pilgrims on their way,” mutters the stranger.  “Capital watchmen, they are worth their salary!  Ye-es, brother, thieves have always been cleverer than watchmen!  Stand still, don’t stir. . . .”

Five minutes, ten minutes pass in silence.  All at once the wind brings the sound of a whistle.

“Well, now you can go,” says the stranger, releasing the watchman’s arm.  “Go and thank God you are alive!”

The stranger gives a whistle too, runs away from the gate, and the watchman hears him leap over the ditch.

With a foreboding of something very dreadful in his heart, the watchman, still trembling with terror, opens the gate irresolutely and runs back with his eyes shut.

At the turning into the main avenue he hears hurried footsteps, and someone asks him, in a hissing voice:  “Is that you, Timofey?  Where is Mitka?”

And after running the whole length of the main avenue he notices a little dim light in the darkness.  The nearer he gets to the light the more frightened he is and the stronger his foreboding of evil.

“It looks as though the light were in the church,” he thinks.  “And how can it have come there?  Save me and have mercy on me, Queen of Heaven!  And that it is.”

The watchman stands for a minute before the broken window and looks with horror towards the altar. . . .  A little wax candle which the thieves had forgotten to put out flickers in the wind that bursts in at the window and throws dim red patches of light on the vestments flung about and a cupboard overturned on the floor, on numerous footprints near the high altar and the altar of offerings.