right, Harry. I go jumping like a bull at a gate as usual. What
would you do?"

Harry's answer was brief and sententious.

"Think."

"Do so, mate," returned Jack, hopefully again; "do so."

"I will."

He pressed his lips and knit his brows with a burlesque, melodramatic
air, and strode up and down, with his forefinger to his forehead.

He stopped suddenly and stamped twice, as a haughty earl might do in a
transpontine tragedy when resolving upon his crowning villany, and
exclaimed in a voice suggestive of fiend-like triumph--

"I have it."

"Hold it tight, then."

"One of us must sham ill so as to get the doctor here. Once he's here,
we shall be all right."

"Hurrah!" cried Jack Harkaway; "that's the notion. We shall yet defeat
the schemes of that incarnate fiend, Murray."

"That is a capital idea," said Mr. Mole. "You have suggested quite a
new idea."

"Now stop; the next thing for us to think of is who is to be the sham
invalid," said Jack.

"I would suggest Tinker," said Harry.

"Or Bogey," observed Mr. Mole.

"Why?"

"Because it would not be easy to tell whether they looked in delicate
health or not."

"There's something in that," said Jack, "but there's this to say
against it."

"What?"

"They might not be able to keep the game up so well as one of
ourselves, so I think----"

Here Jack paused, whilst Harry and he exchanged a meaning wink
unobserved by the old gentleman.

"I think that it ought to be Mr. Mole," continued our hero.

"Why?"

"Why, sir; can you ask why? You are such a lovely shammer."

"Come, I say," began Mr. Mole, scarcely relishing it.

"He's quite right, sir," said Harry Girdwood, "you are inimitable as a
shammer."

"I?"

"You can pitch it so strong, Mr. Mole," said Jack.

"And so natural," added Harry Girdwood.

"Life-like," said the two together, in mingled tones of rapt
admiration.

Mr. Mole was but human.

Humanity is but frail, and ever open to the voice of flattery.

What could Mole do but yield?

Nothing.

He gave in, and shammed very ill indeed.

Well, the result of this was that the gaoler made his report, and the
doctor came.

"_De quoi se plaint-il?_" demanded the doctor, as he entered the cell.

"What does he say?" asked Mole; "I'm as deaf as an adder."

"The doctor asks what you complain of?" said Jack, in a very loud
voice.

"Oh, any thing he likes," returned Mole, impatiently.

They were on the point of bursting out laughing