“You may think I’m a Mexican,” continued the man in his mellow, pleasant voice, “but I’m not.  I’m a Texan—­by the way of Maine.  As I told you, I live in the next tomb, the one on the right.  I’m a watch, clock and tool maker by trade and a bookworm by taste.  Because of the former I’ve come into your cell, and because of the latter I use the ornate language that you hear.  But of both those subjects more further on.  Meanwhile, I suppose it’s you who have been yelling in here at the top of your voice and disturbing a row of dungeons accustomed to peace and quiet.”

“It was probably I, but I don’t remember anything about it.”

“It’s not likely that you would, as I see you’ve had some one of the seven hundred fevers that are customary along this coast.  Yours must have been of the shouting kind, as I heard you clean through the wall, and, once when I was listening at the keyhole, you made a noise like the yell of a charging army.”

“You don’t mean to say that you’ve been listening at the keyhole of my cell.”

“It’s exactly what I mean.  You wouldn’t come to see your neighbor so he decided to come to see you.  Good communications correct evil manners.  See this?”

He held up a steel pronged instrument about six inches long.

“This was once a fork, a fork for eating, large and crude, I grant you, but a fork.  It took me more than a month to steal it, that is I had to wait for a time when I was sure that the soldier who brought my food was so lazy or so stupid that he would not miss it.  I waited another week as an additional precaution, and after that my task was easy.  If the best watch, clock and instrument maker in the State of Maine couldn’t pick any lock with a fork it was time for him to lie on his back and die.  I picked the lock of my own door in a minute the first time by dead reckoning, but it took me a full two minutes to open yours, although I’ll relock it in half that time when I go out.  Where there’s a will there will soon be an open door.”

He flourished the fork, the two prongs of which now curved at the end, and grinned broadly.  He had a look of health despite the dead whiteness of his face, which Ned now knew was caused by prison pallor.  Ned liked him.  He liked him for many reasons.  He liked him because his eyes were kindly.  He liked him because he was one of his own race.  He liked him because he was a fellow prisoner, and he liked him above all because this was the first human companionship that he had had in a time that seemed ages.

Obed meanwhile was examining him with scrutinizing eyes.  He had heard the voice of fever, but he did not expect to find in the “tomb” next to his own a mere boy.

“How does it happen,” he asked, “that one as young as you is a prisoner here in a dungeon with the castle of San Juan de Ulua and the sea on top of him?”

Obed White had the mellowest and most soothing voice that Ned had ever heard.  Now it was like that of a father speaking to the sick son whom he loved, and the boy trusted him absolutely.