“Have you answered this?” asked Higgs.

“No,” answered Orme, setting his mouth.  “I have not answered, and I am not going to answer it, either in writing or in person.  I intend to start to-morrow for Mur and to travel as far on that road as it pleases fate to allow, and now I am going to look at the rock sculptures by the cataract.”

“Well, that’s flat,” said Higgs after he had departed, “and for my part I am glad of it, for somehow I think he will be a useful man among those Fung.  Also, if he went I expect that the Sergeant would go too, and where should we be without Quick, I should like to know?”

Afterwards I conversed with the said Quick about this same matter, repeating to him my opinions, to which the Sergeant listened with the deference which he was always kind enough to show to me.

“Begging your pardon, sir,” he said, when I had finished, “but I think you are both right and wrong.  Everything has two ends, hasn’t it?  You say that it would be wicked for the Captain to get himself killed, there being now so much money for him to live for, seeing that life is common as dirt while money is precious, rare and hard to come by.  It ain’t the kings we admire, it’s their crowns; it ain’t the millionaires, it’s their millions; but, after all, the millionaires don’t take their millions with them, for Providence, that, like Nature, hates waste, knows that if they did they’d melt, so one man dead gives another bread, as the saying goes, or p’raps I should say gingerbread in such cases.

“Still, on the whole, sir, I admit you are right as to the sinfulness of wasting luck.  But now comes the other end.  I know this young lady what the Captain was engaged to, which he never would have been if he had taken my advice, since of all the fish-blooded little serpents that ever I set eyes on she’s the serpentest, though pretty, I allow.  Solomon said in his haste that an honest woman he had not found, but if he had met the Honourable Miss—­well, never mind her name—­he’d have said it at his leisure, and gone on saying it.  Now, no one should never take back a servant what has given notice and then says he’s sorry, for if he does the sorrow will be on the other side before it’s all done; and much less should he take back a fiancee (Quick said a ’finance’), on the whole, he’d better drown himself—­I tried it once, and I know.  So that’s the tail of the business.

“But,” he went on, “it has a couple of fins as well, like that eel beast I caught in the Nile.  One of them is that the Captain promised and vowed to go through with this expedition, and if a man’s got to die, he’d better die honest without breaking his word.  And the other is what I said to you in London when I signed on, that he won’t die a minute before his time, and nothing won’t happen to him, but what’s bound to happen, and therefore it ain’t a ha’porth of use bothering about anything, and that’s where the East’s well ahead of the West.