"I wonder if _you_ ever did any reflecting?" I asked tartly. "What do you think of Quinn?" and Markham looked away as I took my eye from the telescope and gave him an expressive wink. "I don’t think," I continued, "that you ever wrote a book called ’Forty Ways to Starve the Poor.’ You have material enough for a pretty effective volume on the subject, but you haven’t my nerve." "No," he returned slowly, "I haven’t your nerve. It requires unalloyed impudence and a mind incapable of clear thinking to liken the results of high finance with those of your own petty and highly criminal proceedings. You are too bright a man, Mr. Munn, to allow yourself to be led afield by sophistries of that kind." "Mr. Markham, Mr. Markham!" I breathed, in horrified protest. "You have bolstered up your nefarious business with false ideals," he went on, "and you are unregenerate and lost!" "This is awful!" I murmured. "When we get to where we are going," pursued Markham, either failing to note my sarcasm or else hoping to ride it down, "I trust you will hold your criminal instincts in check. If there are any people there, don’t give them any false ideals or implant the notion that your standards belong to the rest of us." "I would not so belittle my ideals," I returned bluntly. "Sir," he cried sharply, "am I to understand that you set yourself up as being any better than Mr. Popham, Mr. Gilhooly, Mr. Meigs, or myself?" "What you understand doesn’t concern me in the least," I answered airily. "What you don’t understand, it strikes me, is the matter that ought to claim your attention." "Confound you, sir! Your overwhelming ignorance is equalled only by your colossal egotism. I am sorry that I allowed myself to be beguiled into any talk with you." "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.