imself to another doughnut. His host leaned back in his
chair and laughed uproariously.

"Well, by the great and mighty!" he exclaimed, "that Willie chap
certainly did fool you, didn't he. You can't always tell about these
college critters. Sometimes they break out unexpected, like chickenpox
in the 'Old Men's Home.' Ha! ha! Say, do you know Nate Scudder?"

"Know him? Course I know him! The meanest man on the Cape, and livin'
right in my own town, too! Well, if I didn't know him I might trust him,
and that would be the beginnin' of the end--for me."

"It sartin would. But what made me think of him was what he told
me about his nephew, who was a college chap, consider'ble like your
'Willie,' I jedge. Nate and this nephew, Augustus Tolliver, was mixed up
in that flyin'-machine business, you remember."

"I know they was. Mixed up with that Professor Dixland the papers are
makin' such a fuss over. Wellmouth's been crazy over it all, but it
happened a year ago and nobody that I know of has got the straight
inside facts about it yet. Nate won't talk at all. Whenever you ask him
he busts out swearin' and walks off. His wife's got such a temper that
nobody dared ask her, except the minister. He tried it, and ain't been
the same man since."

"Well," the depot master smilingly scratched his chin, "I cal'late I've
got those inside facts."

"You HAVE?"

"Yes. Nate gave 'em to me, under protest. You see, I know Nate pretty
well. I know some things about him that . . . but never mind that part.
I asked him and, at last, he told me. I'll have to tell you in his
words, 'cause half the fun was the way he told it and the way he looked
at the whole business. So you can imagine I'm Nate, and--"

"'Twill be a big strain on my imagination to b'lieve you're Nate
Scudder, Sol Berry."

"Thanks. However, you'll have to do it for a spell. Well, Nate said that
it really begun when the Professor and Olivia landed at the Wellmouth
depot with the freight car full of junk. Of course, the actual
beginnin' was further back than that, when that Harmon man come on from
Philadelphy and hunted him up, makin' proclamation that a friend of
his, a Mr. Van Brunt of New York, had said that Scudder had a nice quiet
island to let and maybe he could hire it.

"Course Nate had an island--that little sun-dried sandbank a mile or
so off shore, abreast his house, which we used to call 'Horsefoot Bar.'
That crazy Van Brunt and his chum, Hartley, who lived th