“Well, he’s got his literary job at last, bein’ engaged as sportin’ editor on one of Gabe’s papers.  His dad, old Sol Bearse, seems to be pretty well satisfied, partic’lar as another engagement between the Bearse family and the Sterzers has just been given out.”

Barzilla helped himself 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 there along with Sol Pratt a year or so ago, re-christened it ‘Ozone Island,’ you remember.  Nate was willin’ to let it.  He’d let Tophet, if he owned it, and a fool come along who wanted to hire it and could pay for the rent and heat.