You see I have a stock verse or two to quote at a pinch. But although I don’t see as far, perhaps, into the game as you, it may be that just for that reason I [136] ]see the near points a little more clearly. Now sit down again and tell me what you think of it all.”
We didn’t sit but kept walking up and down. “I don’t know what to think,” I said; “I was nearly sure yesterday that I was either mad or dreaming, but I have given over thinking that. I suppose there is a desperate and widely spread conspiracy against civilised society, and that these men are in it. You talk about fee-faw-fum, but I remembered some things yesterday while we were in that car that made me feel as if the whole world were nothing but what you call fee-faw-fum.”
“What were they, Bob?”
I told him all that I have written in the first two chapters of this book. He listened most attentively, and made me repeat two or three times over parts of the conversation between the two doctors. But when I wound up my story by telling him that I had recognised James Redpath among the men on the platform, he stopped suddenly, turned right round and looked at me. “Good heavens!” he said. And then after a pause, “Do you think that you saw him carried away that morning from your Welsh village?”
“I didn’t see him, but I have little doubt that I saw the shadow of the car in which he was carried away.”
[137] “Do you think that we have stumbled on your friend Dr. Leopold’s non-human intelligence? and that there is a manufactory of black death or plague somewhere in the neighbourhood?”
“I have hardly a doubt of these men’s malignity, but there is one thing I am surer of. Now that I am here I want to know all about the matter—and I mean to. Mr. Leopold may have stumbled upon half a truth.”
“Well, my position is just the reverse of yours. I am curious enough about the matter, but I am so sure of these men’s desperate malignity that my first wish is that we should make our escape from this place. And mind,” he went on to say, “if you want to burst them up that is the way to do it. If you and I get back to civilisation others will soon be on our track. And once there is a settlement of English colonists near here these men will be played out, and they know it. Don’t you remember what the fellow himself said? He said that they could keep the blacks at a distance, but that it does not suit them to carry on their work—whatever it is—in the presence of civilised men!”
“I remember,” said I; “but if you are right, depend upon it they have made up their minds that you and I will never leave this place alive.”
[138] “Not quite that,” said he, “or they would have murdered us before now.”