NSTER ENTERS

Before the morning had passed Bob Morton was as much at home in the
little cottage that faced the sea as if he had lived there all his
days. His property was spread out in the old mahogany bureau upstairs;
his hat dangled from a peg in the hall; and he had exchanged his "city
clothes" for the less conventional outing shirt and suit of blue serge,
both of which transformed him into a figure amazingly slender and
boyish. For two hours he and Celestina had rehearsed the family
history from beginning to end; and now he had left her to get dinner,
and he and Willie had betaken themselves to the workshop where they
were deep in confidential conversation.

"You see," the inventor was explaining to his guest, "it's like this:
it ain't so much that I want to bother with these notions as that I
have to. They get me by the throat, an' there's no shakin' 'em off.
Only yesterday, fur example, I got kitched with an idee about a boat--"
he broke off, regarding his listener with sudden suspicion.

Bob waited.

Evidently Willie's scrutiny of the frank countenance opposite satisfied
him, for dropping his voice he continued in an impressive whisper:

"About a motor-boat, this idee was."

Glancing around as if to assure himself that no one was within hearing,
he hitched the barrel on which he was seated nearer his visitor.

"There's a sight of plague with motor-boats among these shoals," he
went on eagerly. "What with the eel-grass that grows along the inlets
an' the kelp that's washed in by the tide after a storm, the propeller
of a motor-boat is snarled up a good bit of the time. Now my scheme,"
he announced, his last trace of reserve vanishing, "is to box that
propeller somehow--if so be as it can be done--an'--," the voice
trailed off into meditation.

Robert Morton, too, was silent.

"You would have to see that the wheel was kept free," he mused aloud
after an interval.

"I know it."

"And not check the speed of the boat."

"Right you are, mate!" exclaimed Willie with delight.

"And not hamper the swing of the rudder."

"You have it! You have it!" Willie shouted, rubbing his hands together
and smiling broadly. "It's all them things I'm up against."

"I believe the trick might be turned, though," replied young Morton,
rising from the nail keg on which he was sitting and striding about the
narrow room. "It's a pretty problem and one it would be rather good
fun to work out."

"I'd need to rig up