onesomer and less and less
talky, till at last the talk ran dry altogether, and we just set there
and "thunk," as Jim calls it, and never said a word the longest time.

The professor never stirred till the sun was overhead, then he stood up
and put a kind of triangle to his eye, and Tom said it was a sextant
and he was taking the sun to see whereabouts the balloon was. Then he
ciphered a little and looked in a book, and then he begun to carry on
again. He said lots of wild things, and, among others, he said he would
keep up this hundred-mile gait till the middle of to-morrow afternoon,
and then he'd land in London.

We said we would be humbly thankful.

He was turning away, but he whirled around when we said that, and
give us a long look of his blackest kind--one of the maliciousest and
suspiciousest looks I ever see. Then he says:

"You want to leave me. Don't try to deny it."

We didn't know what to say, so we held in and didn't say nothing at all.

He went aft and set down, but he couldn't seem to git that thing out of
his mind. Every now and then he would rip out something about it, and
try to make us answer him, but we dasn't.

It got lonesomer and lonesomer right along, and it did seem to me I
couldn't stand it. It was still worse when night begun to come on. By
and by Tom pinched me and whispers:

"Look!"

I took a glance aft, and see the professor taking a whet out of a
bottle. I didn't like the looks of that. By and by he took another
drink, and pretty soon he begun to sing. It was dark now, and getting
black and stormy. He went on singing, wilder and wilder, and the thunder
begun to mutter, and the wind to wheeze and moan among the ropes, and
altogether it was awful. It got so black we couldn't see him any more,
and wished we couldn't hear him, but we could. Then he got still; but
he warn't still ten minutes till we got suspicious, and wished he would
start up his noise again, so we could tell where he was. By and by
there was a flash of lightning, and we see him start to get up, but he
staggered and fell down. We heard him scream out in the dark:

"They don't want to go to England. All right, I'll change the course.
They want to leave me. I know they do. Well, they shall--and NOW!"

I 'most died when he said that. Then he was still again--still so long I
couldn't bear it, and it did seem to me the lightning wouldn't EVER come
again. But at last there was a blessed flash, and there he was, on his