The red-headed man guffawed.
"And you!" exploded the savant, turning on the spectators. "Get out of here! Yes, all of you, you riffraff! I won't have you on the place!"
Henry's potential customers fled before the Paulsen wrath like chaff before the wind, leaving the quaking little entrepreneur to face his fate alone. He stood braced against the verbal cloud-burst, eyes squeezed tight shut behind steel-rimmed glasses, goatee sticking straight out.
"For days these snoopers have driven me half-crazy!" raged the professor. "I've tried every trick I could think of to keep them out. I've put signs forbidding trespassing on every tree. I've threatened mayhem and murder. Yet still they come!"
"But Joseph—"
"Keep quiet 'til I'm finished, you disgrace to science!" The lean scholar ran trembling fingers through his greying hair. Then:
"And now—today! Major Coggleston and I go down to the end of the meadow to drive three of the sneaking human dung beetles away from knot-holes. When we get back, what do we find?"
"Joseph, please—"
"We find you—my colleague, my partner, my friend! You—peddling the use of your binoculars to the slimy creatures!" He glared savagely at his victim. "If you were in Paris, Henry Horn, you'd be selling French postcards to tourists!"