He was not working in the dark, but had possessed himself of my bull's-eye lantern, which I had left on descending from the loft some time before. Mounted on a pile of packing cases, he was engaged in painting a large steel cube, taking his pigment from an open cask with a whitewash brush.
"My anti-gravity compound!" exclaimed the professor in an irritated tone. "There are several blocks on the floor, as you can see: Gilhooly began painting that one, and it rose as insulation proceeded, lodging to the left of the dome and tilted the car."
"This is the shabbiest lot of coaches I ever saw in my life," said Gilhooly, dabbing away with the brush. "I won't own a road with such rolling stock."
The three men downstairs had followed Quinn and me. After some coaxing, Meigs got Gilhooly to descend from his perch and give up the whitewash brush.
Thereupon the cube was pried over until it rested directly under another block in the point of the dome, and the professor finished the insulation begun by the railway magnate.
"Gilhooly will have to be watched," said Quinn, "or he will play havoc with the materials I have stored up here. He has wasted at least a quart of that anti-gravity mixture, and it is worth its weight in gold. Nay, it is worth more than that, for after this supply is exhausted there will be none to be had for love or money.
"Our rate of speed has been multiplied by two, and we are rushing through space with frightful rapidity. There is my telescope"—and the professor pointed to the instrument which stood beneath a window in the sloping roof of the car. "Suppose Gilhooly had demolished that! Or what if he had wrecked the oxygen vat, or the anti-temperature reservoir! Gentlemen, I shudder to think of what might have happened."
The professor sank down on a copper tank and brushed his perspiring brow with a bandanna handkerchief. I placed the lamp on a box beside the bull's-eye lantern and reclined on a bale of something or other that lay conveniently near.
Meigs and Popham dropped down on a packing case with Gilhooly moored between them, and Markham took up his station on an overturned cask.
The loft of the car, stored as it was with odds and ends of science, together with a supply of provisions made ready for us by the farsighted and wonderful man who was conducting this select party into the unknown, was an object of deep solicitude and interest.