“Oh, no, you don’t!” murmured the engineer again.  His lips trembled almost imperceptibly; his hands too, a little:  and to calm himself he opened the writing-desk, spread out a sheet of thin grayish paper covered with a mass of printed figures and began to scan them attentively for the twentieth time this trip at least.

With his elbows propped, his head between his hands, he seemed to lose himself in the study of an abstruse problem in mathematics.  It was the list of the winning numbers from the last drawing of the great lottery which had been the one inspiring fact of so many years of his existence.  The conception of a life deprived of that periodical sheet of paper had slipped away from him entirely, as another man, according to his nature, would not have been able to conceive a world without fresh air, without activity, or without affection.  A great pile of flimsy sheets had been growing for years in his desk, while the Sofala, driven by the faithful Jack, wore out her boilers in tramping up and down the Straits, from cape to cape, from river to river, from bay to bay; accumulating by that hard labor of an overworked, starved ship the blackened mass of these documents.  Massy kept them under lock and key like a treasure.  There was in them, as in the experience of life, the fascination of hope, the excitement of a half-penetrated mystery, the longing of a half-satisfied desire.

For days together, on a trip, he would shut himself up in his berth with them:  the thump of the toiling engines pulsated in his ear; and he would weary his brain poring over the rows of disconnected figures, bewildering by their senseless sequence, resembling the hazards of destiny itself.  He nourished a conviction that there must be some logic lurking somewhere in the results of chance.  He thought he had seen its very form.  His head swam; his limbs ached; he puffed at his pipe mechanically; a contemplative stupor would soothe the fretfulness of his temper, like the passive bodily quietude procured by a drug, while the intellect remains tensely on the stretch.  Nine, nine, aught, four, two.  He made a note.  The next winning number of the great prize was forty-seven thousand and five.  These numbers of course would have to be avoided in the future when writing to Manilla for the tickets.  He mumbled, pencil in hand . . . “and five.  Hm . . . hm.”  He wetted his finger:  the papers rustled.  Ha!  But what’s this?  Three years ago, in the September drawing, it was number nine, aught, four, two that took the first prize.  Most remarkable.  There was a hint there of a definite rule!  He was afraid of missing some recondite principle in the overwhelming wealth of his material.  What could it be? and for half an hour he would remain dead still, bent low over the desk, without twitching a muscle.  At his back the whole berth would be thick with a heavy body of smoke, as if a bomb had burst in there, unnoticed, unheard.