“I see,” said Billy as he found a seat. “You’ve changed her name and her paint, haven’t you?”
“Oh, plenty of times since you saw her last,” was the reply. “Let’s see, she was the Ark, then, wasn’t she?”
“No, sir, the Greased Lightning.”
“To be sure, so she was. That was when she was ultramarine and sulphur yellow: Well, she’s had many names since then, and many colors. You ought to have seen her when she was Joseph’s Coat; she was striped then with six colors and very effective. At one place I stopped they wanted to arrest me for disturbing the peace.” And the artist laid back his head and laughed uproariously in his deep voice.
“I saw her lying at the island this morning,” said Billy, “and I thought that she looked something like your boat, but the difference in the name and the painting misled me.”
“Naturally, although you ought to be able to penetrate a disguise, Noon. I mean that you ought to have remembered her graceful lines. I was telling these chaps this afternoon that I wanted to get rid of her now, for I’ve tried about every combination of colors I can think of, and I’m running out of names as well.”
“How would the Keep Mum do for a name?” asked Billy carelessly.
“Eh? Oh, well, it might,” answered the artist thoughtfully, eying Billy across the firelight. “By the way, what are you doing now?”
“I’ve got a bit of a boat with a sail in it, and I’m going down the river in the interests of Billings’s ‘Wonders of the Deep,’” answered Billy. The artist chuckled.