Now what in the world had he meant by that?
She had asked Wayne, but Wayne had seemed so seriously interested in the remark, and asked such direct questions as to who made it, that she had tried to cover her tracks, thinking perhaps the man who mended the boats could be thrown into the guard-house for saying such dark things about army saddles.
On the way home from that talk Watts had branded the man who mended the boats as one of them low-down anarchists that ought to be shot at sunrise.

Things was as they _was_, held Watts, and how could anybody but a fool expect them to be any way but the way they _was_?
It showed what _he_ was--and after that Worth had had no more fireworks of thought for a week, Watts standing guard over the world as it was.
But he slipped into an odd place in Katie's life of wonderings and fancyings, and that life of musing and questioning was so big and so real a life in those days.

He was something to shoot things out at, to hang things to.

She held imaginary conversations with him, demolished him in imaginary arguments only to stand him up and demolish him again.
Sometimes she quite winked with him at the world as it was, and at other times she withdrew to lofty heights and said cutting things.

In more friendly mood she asked him questions, sometimes questions he could not answer, and she could not answer them either, and then their thoughts would hover around together, brooding over a world of unanswerable things.