Satan: A Romance of the Bahamas

By H: De Vere Stacpoole Author of “The Blue Lagoon,” “The Beach of Dreams,” Etc.
NEW YORK ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY 1921
Copyright, 1920, by Robert M. McBride & Co.
Printed in the United States of America
Published, · 1921

The sky from sea-line to sea-line was crusted with stars, a triumphant, cloudless, tropic night-sky beneath which the Dryad rode at her anchor, lifting lazily to the swell flowing up from beyond the great Bahama bank.
She was Skelton’s boat, a six-hundred-tonner, turbine engined, rigged with everything new in the way of sea valves and patent gadgets, and she had anchored at sundown off Palm Island, a tiny spot, gull haunted, and due west of Andros.
Skelton was a Christchurch man, Bobby Ratcliffe a Brazenose, and Bobby, tonight, as he leaned on the starboard rail smoking and listening to the wash of the waves on the island beach, was thinking of Skelton, who was down below writing up his diary. Before coming on this “winter cruise to the West Indies in my yacht” Bobby did not know that Skelton kept a diary, that Skelton was so awfully Anglican, so precise, so stuffed with the convenances, that he dined in dress clothes even in a hurricane, that he had a very nasty, naggling temper, that he had prayers every Sunday morning in the cabin which the chief steward, the under stewards, and the officers off watch were expected to attend—also Bobby. Two other men were booked for the cruise, but they cried off at the last moment. If they had come, things might have been different. As it was, Bobby, to use his own language, was pretty much fed up.
Skelton was a right good sort, but he was not the man with whom to share loneliness, and Bobby, who had plenty of money of his own, was thinking how jolly this winter cruise would have been if he had only taken it on board a passenger liner, with girls and deck quoits and cards in the evening, instead of Skelton.
Bobby was only twenty-two, a good-looking clean youth, well-balanced enough, but desirous of fun. Oxford had not spoiled him a bit. He had no “manner,”—just his own naturalness,—and he had shocked Skelton at Barbados by getting a great negro washing woman on board (she had come alongside in a blue boat) and giving her rum, for the fun of the thing. “Debauching a native woman with alcohol!” Skelton had called it.