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. »A man
locked up in a confounded dark hole is not much use to anybody.«
    »As to old Viola,« the doctor continued, as though he had not heard,
»Sotillo released him for the same reason he is presently going to release you.«
    »Eh? What?« exclaimed Captain Mitchell, staring like an owl in the darkness.
»What is there in common between me and old Viola? More likely because