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 black- guard on earth." Had it not been for Captain Mitchell's depression, caused by the fatal news, his distrust 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 beach-comber 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 |uarrel 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—"