“Will you gentlemen be good enough to come to breakfast?”
It was Mrs. Anderson, standing in the boathouse door.
Too excited to respond immediately, Andy continued:
“Why did he make such a light engine, if it was for use on a boat?”
“Well, here’s the idea,” explained the captain, nodding to his wife. “Your uncle lived here nearly ten years. Finally he had to take to boating. But he hadn’t any more use for a sailboat than I have for a power-boat. So he rigged up a gasoline engine and a screw on an old hull, and began runnin’ aground on every bar in the river. That’s when I had the laugh on him, because I knew the channels. At last he got mad. And one day, he figured out the aero-catamaran. Here’s a plan of it,” added the captain, pointing to a scale drawing on the wall.
“It has air propellers!” was Andy’s immediate exclamation.
“Sure,” said the captain. “And they were all right; they made her hump, too.”
The design showed the two twenty-foot narrow boats (or racing shells) braced together after the manner of East India catamarans. On the crosspieces, which afforded a deck space seven feet wide, a heavier frame was shown. On this, rising something less than a foot above the boat gunwales, rested the engine, from which a shaft extended sternward.
Beginning at the engine, and also extending aft, was another open frame six feet long and seven by seven feet in width and height. Shafted on each top rear corner of this frame was a six-foot propeller connected with the engine shaft by chain drives. In front of the engine the boat braces were decked and here, similar to an automobile steering wheel, was a wheel from which wires extended to the rudder at the stern of each shell.
“Why’d you take her apart?” asked Andy at last, his voice full of unmeant rebuke.