"You shouldn't hit a man when he's down, Dick," he replied soberly. "You know how I was planning to play the god-in-the-car to this little bunch of people, and what a chaotic, heart-breaking mess I've made of it. With all sorts of horrors staring us in the face, you can't blame me if I go batty now and then. You'd do it yourself if you were staggering under my load. I'm to blame for all this, Dick; I, and nobody else."
It doesn't do any particular good to rub salt into a wound—even a foolish wound. So I contented myself with asking a sort of routine question:
"Does Madeleine know how she is being robbed?"
"She does. I was obliged to tell her that much."
"How did she take it?"
"Like the angel that she is, Dick. She says the gold doesn't belong to her, any more than it does to anybody else who might dig it up; and that, anyway, it doesn't matter when there are so many more important things at stake."
"She is quite right about that," I agreed. "With a chancy voyage in an open boat ahead of us——"
"We'll never make that voyage, Dick," he said solemnly. "I think you know that as well as I do."
"Why won't we?"
"Because we are never going to be given the chance. You are not confiding enough to believe that this fat devil is going to keep his promise, to us, are you?"