and her bottom was pretty rotten, so I got scared he'd git her stove in. So I fixed up a—uh—dinkus that kinda lifted her up some. Kinda like a dinkus I gave you, suh, only this one pushes water away, so's it lifts up the boat. I done it because it was easier'n puttin' new planks on. Like to see it, suh?"

"I would," said Murfree, with vast self-control.

Bud called drowsily to his son and gave him orders. The boy reluctantly went down to the boat, tied to a one-plank wharf before the door. An arm of Puget Sound ran into this cut-over land and provided Bud and his family with fishing. The boy climbed into the boat. He pushed off. Then Murfree tensed.

The ancient, unwieldy, tub-shaped craft literally shot out to the middle of the estuary before the shack. It traveled like a bullet, leaving no wake to speak of. What wake there was was only of its keel. The boat itself simply did not touch the water. It had lifted until only its keel-board slithered across the tops of the ripples like a single ice-skate over ice.

Out in the center, the boat turned. Murfree could see clearly. It just barely touched the surface. It accelerated like a crazy thing. It hit eighty miles an hour—and boats do not do that. Then the boy slowed, stopped, and busied himself in the cockpit. Then the launch rose straight up from the water. It lifted smoothly to a height of some forty feet, the height of a four-story building, and stayed there in mid-air. It was unhandy when the boy drove it, aloft. There was no effective rudder. But after a moment or two the boy lowered it to the water and drove it back to the wharf.

"Li'l rascal!" said Gregory, fondly. "I had that fixed so's it wouldn't lift the boat more'n a coupla feet. What's he want to git up that high for?"

Murfree said unsteadily, "Of course that's worth several million dollars. It makes all helicopters and most aeroplanes obsolete."

"Shucks!" said Bud, grinning. "You want me to make some more of 'em! You know me, Mistuh Murfree! I'm settin' pretty right now. I'm drinkin' beer and eatin' hawgmeat and not botherin' nobody and nobody botherin' me. I don't aim to work myself to death. I'm perfectly satisfied just the way I am with just what I got!"

"And I," said Murfree, "am pretty well satisfied with the gadget you've got in that boat. It's part of what's needed, anyhow. I'm going to Seattle to buy some stuff for you to work with. And while I'm gone 

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