ourself, if these would-be Peeping Toms
are willing to pay for nakedness."

The red-headed man guffawed.

"And you!" exploded the savant, turning on the spectators. "Get out of
here! Yes, all of you, you riffraff! I won't have you on the place!"

Henry's potential customers fled before the Paulsen wrath like chaff
before the wind, leaving the quaking little entrepreneur to face his
fate alone. He stood braced against the verbal cloud-burst, eyes
squeezed tight shut behind steel-rimmed glasses, goatee sticking
straight out.

"For days these snoopers have driven me half-crazy!" raged the
professor. "I've tried every trick I could think of to keep them out.
I've put signs forbidding trespassing on every tree. I've threatened
mayhem and murder. Yet still they come!"

"But Joseph--"

"Keep quiet 'til I'm finished, you disgrace to science!" The lean
scholar ran trembling fingers through his greying hair. Then:

"And now--today! Major Coggleston and I go down to the end of the meadow
to drive three of the sneaking human dung beetles away from knot-holes.
When we get back, what do we find?"

"Joseph, please--"

"We find you--my colleague, my partner, my friend! You--peddling the use
of your binoculars to the slimy creatures!" He glared savagely at his
victim. "If you were in Paris, Henry Horn, you'd be selling French
postcards to tourists!"

* * * * *

Still purple with rage, the savant turned away. Stared dourly back
toward the high board fence that surrounded the nudists.

The next instant he jerked as stiff as if an electric shock had jolted
through him.

"Henry!"

"Yes, Joseph." The other's voice was meekly plaintive as he awaited a
renewal of the diatribe.

"Henry, that fence is between us and the nudists! How could you see
them, binoculars or not?"

Henry's face brightened. His goatee moved to a more confident angle.

"That's what I've been trying to tell you, Joseph," he explained. "It's
my new invention--"

"Invention!" There was a hysterical note in the way Professor Paulsen
exclaimed the word. "Please, Henry, not that! Don't tell me you've been
inventing again--"

His little colleague bristled.

"And why shouldn't I be inventing, Joseph Paulsen?" he demanded
querulously. "My inventions are mighty valuable. Why my new
explosive--"[2]

"--Which you ran onto quite by accident, and which turned out not to be
an explosive at all," the professor cut in grimly.