“Exactly,” said the Colonel, smiling; and seeing that it was apparently taken as a good joke, Dinass grinned widely.
“Then they got more and more disappointed as they found out what a prize they’d let slip through their fingers; and at last got so wild that, when I went to report to ’em one Sunday, they asked me if I couldn’t do something to spoil your game.”
“On a Sunday, eh?” said the Colonel.
“Oh, yes, it was on a Sunday, sir. So I said I’d try and think it out; and at last I did, and went and told ’em I thought I could let the water in and spoil the mine, and then they’d be able to buy it cheap.”
“And what did they say?”
“Oh, they both coughed and rubbed their hands, and said it would be too shocking a thing to do, and that I should be bringing myself under the law, and all on in that way, pretending like to make me feel that they didn’t want me to do it, but egging me on all the time.”
“Ah, I see,” said the Colonel, while Gwyn’s teeth gritted together with rage.
“I wasn’t going to shilly-shally, so I ast ’em downright if I should do it, and ‘Oh, dear no,’ says they, they couldn’t think of such a thing; and little Dix says, ‘Of course, as we promised, if we had succeeded in buying the mine for our company through your reports we should have given you the situation of captain of the working and a hundred pounds; but we couldn’t think of encouraging such criminal ideas as those you ’mulgated. Let me see,’ he says, ‘it was to be a hundred pounds, warn’t it?’
“‘Yes,’ I says, ‘it was.’
“‘Exactly,’ he says, ‘but we haven’t got the mine, so we wish you good-morning,’ which was like renewing the offer in an underhanded way. So I come back and did it.”