disrespectfully close to the Isle of Dignity.  Katie was too true a romancer to inquire closely about the man who mended the boats, for she 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 withdrew to lofty heights and said cutting things.  In more friendly mood she asked him questions, sometimes questions he could not answer, and she could not answer them either, and then their thoughts would hover around together, brooding over a world of unanswerable things.  All her life she had held those imaginary conversations, but heretofore it had been with her horse, her dog, the trees, a white cloud against the blue, something somewhere.  None of the hundreds of nice people she knew had ever moved her to imaginary conversations.  And so now it was stimulating—­energizing—­not to have to diffuse her thought into the unknown, but to direct it at, and through, the man who mended the boats and said strange things to Worth up at the tip of the Island.