“What do you mean?” interrupted the boy.
“Well,” went on the captain, “they say, mind you I just say they say, that there is a village o’ blacks over there bossed by an old African who thinks he’s a king, King Cajou. And,” laughed the captain, “they say that old Cajou ain’t ever been cured o’ eatin’ his enemies—and sometimes those who ain’t.”
[CHAPTER IX]
A NEW IDEA IN AEROPLANES
As Andy Leighton prepared for bed that night, one idea possessed his mind. He would in some manner penetrate Ba’s ignorance and learn the story of Timbado Key and its king.
Then he fell asleep to dream of a tropic isle whereon, beneath palms, a band of ghoulish savages, black, and clad in skins and feathers, knelt in groveling obeisance before a chief, their king, the cannibal Cajou.
His brain was yet full of these things in the morning, but the first smell of the shavings in the shop was an antidote; Ba and Timbado, for the moment, were put aside.
“Since I’ve got you started,” said Andy to the captain, after an hour of replanning, “I guess I’ll go over to my own factory. I’m goin’ to make the wooden part of the tail guide here, but I’ve got to do the metal work, the cogwheels, shaft-guides, and lever joints on the forge and lathe.”
This was Wednesday morning. Friday evening when the Red Bird returned from the Leighton cottage, it carried a box of shaft cogs and other metal parts. In the shop that evening, stood, in the rough, the frame of the future car—Captain Anderson’s handiwork.