“I don’t know—I don’t want to know.”
“You do know!” cried Frank angrily.
“I tell you I won’t know!” said the professor, almost as shortly. “I know that we have done nothing but good all the way—that we could not have done it without food—and that it was given to us in payment for what we have done. Be sensible, my lad. We did not let loose these murderous human beasts who have made us prisoners, and whether we eat or starve ourselves it will make no difference to their actions. Go on eating, then? Why, of course we do. You talk as if it were our mission as Christians when we came upon a wounded man to put him out of his misery.”
“No, no!” cried Frank.
“But you and Bob Morris seem to think so. You can’t take one of his bottles of hydrocyanic acid and pour it into one of the desert wells, and then call the whole band up to drink, can you?”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Landon!” said Frank angrily.
“Then don’t you, my dear boy. Can’t you see that this is all outside of our plans?”
“Yes, of course,” said the doctor.
“We never meant to be taken prisoners and to be forced to be chief surgeon-physician to a band of murderous cut-throats.”
“No,” said Frank, “but we are.”