liked to think of him as an unreal
being who only touched the earth off the tip of the Island, and only
touched humanity through Worth. That wove something alluringly
mysterious--and mysteriously alluring--about the man who made sick boats
well, whereas had she given rein to the possibility of his belonging to
the motorboat factory across the river, and scientifically testing
gasoline engines it would be neither proper nor interesting that her
young nephew should run back and forth with pearls of wit and wisdom. It
developed that Worth visited this tip of the Island with the ever
faithful Watts, and that one day the boat mender and Watts had--oh just
the awfulest fight with words Worth had ever heard. It was about the
Government, which the man who mended the boats said was running on one
cylinder, drawing from patriotic Watts the profane defense that it had
all the power it needed for blowing up just such fools as that! He
further held that soldiers were first-class dishwashers and should be
brave enough to demand first-class dishwashing pay. Katie had chuckled
over that. But she had puzzled rather than chuckled over the statement
that the first war the saddles manufactured on that Island would see
would be the war over the manufacturing of them. Now what in the world
had he meant by that? She had asked Wayne, but Wayne had seemed so
seriously interested in the remark, and asked such direct questions as to
who made it, that she had tried to cover her tracks, thinking perhaps the
man who mended the boats could be thrown into the guard-house for saying
such dark things about army saddles.

On the way home from that talk Watts had branded the man who mended the
boats as one of them low-down anarchists that ought to be shot at
sunrise. Things was as they _was_, held Watts, and how could anybody but
a fool expect them to be any way but the way they _was_? It showed what
_he_ was--and after that Worth had had no more fireworks of thought for a
week, Watts standing guard over the world as it was.

But he slipped into an odd place in Katie's life of wonderings and
fancyings, and that life of musing and questioning was so big and so real
a life in those days. He was something to shoot things out at, to hang
things to. She held imaginary conversations with him, demolished him in
imaginary arguments only to stand him up and demolish him again.
Sometimes she quite winked with him at the world as it was, and at other
times she wit