“That’s what I call a delicate compliment,” said Billy, lifting his mask so he could grin with freedom.
“M’ yes, I suppose so,” said Winona doubtfully. “Are we going to start soon, marshal?”
“In about ten minutes,” said the marshal, seeming to be still entranced with the canoe and its decorations. “They burnt one o’ my great-grandmothers, a couple o’ hundred years ago, for doin’ not much worse’n you be,” he added.
“We ought to get something, then,” said Winona, thinking more of a possible prize than of the marshal’s family history.
“You sure ought!” he said darkly, handing them a number and passing on to the next boat.
The ten minutes seemed very long and tedious, but between eating some sandwiches which Winona had thoughtfully provided, exchanging compliments with the neighboring boats, and getting their Greek fire ready to set off, they passed somehow. The whistle blew, and the long trail of boats, canoes, and floats started on its slow and winding way. The float was tied far off, at the beginning of the procession, where they could not see it. Marie’s canoe was just in sight, but not near enough to talk to—a big silver cobweb spotted with lantern-flies, and Marie and Edith dressed as the Spider and the Fly, at either end of it.
Finally the whistle blew. Billy tucked a final piece of sandwich beneath his mask, and resigned himself to tending the Greek fire for the rest of the evening. As for Winona, finding nothing particular to do, she pulled a book out from under a cushion and began to read.
“Winona, would you kindly lay away that piece of literatuah and wo’k the Gabriel ho’n?” asked Billy in the softest and Kentuckiest of voices. Winona had observed that when Billy’s Southern accent reasserted itself he was generally in deadly earnest. She meekly put the book away and began to press the bulb of the horn at regular intervals.
“Oh, I do wish we could see us, and be us, too!” she said in one of the intervals.
“M’m! Don’t I?” said Billy. “I don’t know, though. Maybe we’d be disappointed.”