“Well,” I grinned at the hungry ones, “did you entertain the whispering ghost last night with some choice hand organ selections?”
Peg shook his head.
“Nothing happened all night long,” he told me, disappointed.
At eight-thirty Scoop drove to the dock with the engine. We had a time unloading it. And when we finally got it into the boat we despaired [[49]]for a time of ever being able to use it. We moved it this way and that way, trying various schemes. But we didn’t get anywhere.
The trouble was we had no way of getting our power into the water. It was no particular trick to set up the engine—that part of the task gave us no concern; but it was a trick, let me tell you, to figure out a practical propeller.
We finally decided that we would have to buy a drive shaft from Mr. Solbeam. This cost us another fifty cents. Our thirty dollars, I told Scoop, was going fast. We had spent five dollars and fifty cents.
“That’s all right,” he said easily. “We should expect to pay out our working capital. That’s what it’s for.”
“I’ll be glad,” I said, “when the money starts coming in.”
“The engine scheme,” he said, “is going to put us back a day or two. But it’s better, I think, to be a day or so behind, and do the thing right, than to start up in a hurry and make a halfway job of it.”
After a lot of puzzling work we finally got our engine bolted in position on the rear deck, to one side of the big rudder. Of course, it would have been better if we could have positioned the engine [[50]]in the center of the deck where the rudder was. But that was out of the question.