fire, but it never made any difference, we couldn't seem to git past that
center no way. I couldn't see that we ever gained an inch on that ring.
It made a body feel creepy, it was so curious and unaccountable.

Well, everything was so awful still that we got to talking in a very low
voice, and kept on getting creepier and lonesomer and less and less
talky, till at last the talk ran dry altogether, and we just set there
and "thunk," as Jim calls it, and never said a word the longest time.

The professor never stirred till the sun was overhead, then he stood up
and put a kind of triangle to his eye, and Tom said it was a sextant and
he was taking the sun to see whereabouts the balloon was. Then he
ciphered a little and looked in a book, and then he begun to carry on
again. He said lots of wild things, and, among others, he said he would
keep up this hundred-mile gait till the middle of to-morrow afternoon,
and then he'd land in London.

We said we would be humbly thankful.

He was turning away, but he whirled around when we said that, and give us
a long look of his blackest kind--one of the maliciousest and
suspiciousest looks I ever see. Then he says:

"You want to leave me. Don't try to deny it."

We didn't know what to say, so we held in and didn't say nothing at all.

He went aft and set down, but he couldn't seem to git that thing out of
his mind. Every now and then he would rip out something about it, and try
to make us answer him, but we dasn't.