must have buried it on the shores of this harbour somewhere before they
sailed out.'"

"Heavens and earth!" muttered Captain Mitchell, "I should not have
believed that anybody could be ass enough--" He paused, then went on
mournfully: "But what's the good of all this? It would have been a
clever enough lie if the lighter had been still afloat. It would have
kept that inconceivable idiot perhaps from sending out the steamer to
cruise in the gulf. That was the danger that worried me no end." Captain
Mitchell sighed profoundly.

"I had an object," the doctor pronounced, slowly.

"Had you?" muttered Captain Mitchell. "Well, that's lucky, or else
I would have thought that you went on fooling him for the fun of the
thing. And perhaps that was your object. Well, I must say I personally
wouldn't condescend to that sort of thing. It is not to my taste. No,
no. Blackening a friend's character is not my idea of fun, if it were to
fool the greatest blackguard on earth."

Had it not been for Captain Mitchell's depression, caused by the fatal
news, his disgust of Dr. Monygham would have taken a more outspoken
shape; but he thought to himself that now it really did not matter what
that man, whom he had never liked, would say and do.

"I wonder," he grumbled, "why they have shut us up together, or why
Sotillo should have shut you up at all, since it seems to me you have
been fairly chummy up there?"

"Yes, I wonder," said the doctor grimly.

Captain Mitchell's heart was so heavy that he would have preferred
for the time being a complete solitude to the best of company. But
any company would have been preferable to the doctor's, at whom he had
always looked askance as a sort of beachcomber of superior intelligence
partly reclaimed from his abased state. That feeling led him to ask--

"What has that ruffian done with the other two?"

"The chief engineer he would have let go in any case," said the doctor.
"He wouldn't like to have a quarrel with the railway upon his hands.
Not just yet, at any rate. I don't think, Captain Mitchell, that you
understand exactly what Sotillo's position is--"

"I don't see why I should bother my head about it," snarled Captain
Mitchell.

"No," assented the doctor, with the same grim composure. "I don't see
why you should. It wouldn't help a single human being in the world if
you thought ever so hard upon any subject whatever."

"No," said Captain Mitchell, simply, and with evident depression.