"Our regrets are mutual," said I, "for your conversation is demoralizing. You are a past master in successful trickery—trickery of the sort that ought to be stamped out. If the law was as quick to deal with you as with me——"
"Hold!" fumed Markham, plunging for the stairs, "I have heard enough."
I have said that I was a hard man, in those times. I could call a spade a spade with never a thought that my angle of vision was distorted. I have regretted expressing my views in this frank fashion to Markham, yet I believe that there was injustice in his remarks no less than in mine.
Being the only person in the car who possessed a watch, the professor appointed me official time-keeper. It was my duty to bulletin the hour, with its equivalent in days such as we were accustomed to, upon a blackboard in the lower room; I had also to enter this information upon a book, which the professor called the "log-book."
Every ten hours we had a class in astronomy, with the professor as instructor and with every man save Gilhooly and the lookout as students. The railway magnate's aberration continued; all we could do was to watch him solicitously and prevent him from doing any injury to himself or to our paraphernalia.
The class learned that the nearest planet with an atmosphere, and supposedly habitable, was Venus, which, at inferior conjunction, is distant some twenty-five million miles from Terra, as Quinn called our own planet. Counting out the delays at starting, and in maneuvring to escape the asteroid, our instructor asserted that we should reach Venus in something like seventy-five hours.
Markham, Meigs, and Popham, on consulting the bulletin board and finding that seventy hours had passed, began to brush their clothes and tidy themselves against the hour of landing. But they were destined to disappointment.
Unable to locate Venus at the point where he had hoped to find it, the professor decided that it was nearing superior conjunction and was somewhere on the other side of the sun. Meigs made a deplorable display of temper.
Quinn was a mighty poor astronomer, he said sneeringly, if he could find himself so far wide of the mark on such a simple matter. Meigs further added—with a good deal of childishness as I thought—that the role of a derelict was distasteful to him: a derelict, he argued, was nothing more than a tramp, and he objected to being a tramp, even a celestial tramp.
I was out of patience with the man. Admiration for the professor had taken fast hold of me and I would not have him sneered at or maligned.