"So you sell pictures," encouraged Marjorie. "And paint them yourself!"
"Aye, ma'am. All hands lost but myself—piled up on a reef of this island. A master should go with his ship." He clutched at his parcel and began tearing off the string.
"Picters o' my island. I allus was a painter," he continued, "if I did foller the sea. Why, in my bark, the Wetherall it was, I had fancy picters on the bulkheads an' gold linin' over the white but she got in a twistin' jimmycane, such as we have in these waters. Thar's my island!"
He held up one canvas, a foot high and two feet wide, tacked over a piece of board. It was a gaudy representation of an island wrought with pathetic lack of skill. There was a conical peak at the left end smeared with a slash of purple, and over it a very red and very round sun. The land sloped away from the peak to the other end of the island, and was lost in a white streak extending seaward, the the bony finger of a skeleton, marking a reef clothed with fuzzy breakers. A rocky ledge ran down to where the reef began and a big gray stone stood up abruptly, giving the island the appearance of a bluff-bowed vessel, and under it, a triangular patch of beach. Near the rock were four palm trees. One bent over at a sharp angle, as if it had been partly uprooted, and its moppy fronds almost trailed in the still water of a pool formed by a second reef, not so clearly defined, which ran parallel with the land. Except inside this natural basin the whole shore of the island was wreathed by white rollers and behind the shore line was a fringe of vividly green jungle.
"Oh, isn't that splendid!" exclaimed Marjorie.
"It's a work o' art, that's what everybody says," remarked the old man with a show of pride.
"What do you call the island?" asked Locke.
"The name don't matter, sir. 'Dinshaw's Island' they call it hereabouts, in honour o' the fact I was wrecked on it. Blown off my course in a typhoon at night and went smash into this reef ye see here. I was washed out o' the riggin', an' when I come to I was on the beach here, wreckage all round, an' the sun shinin' bright as a whiffet, an' me all beat out an' water-logged. Right there it was," and he put his thumb on a spot near the rock.
"Is it a big island?" asked Trask.
"Not in the way ye might think. Big enough as it goes, but it ain't the size what counts," and he broke into a cackling laugh, wagging his head, as if he held the secret of a great joke.