“There you are, Cranston.” Ronjan shook his shaggy hair and spread his arms deprecatingly. “The Good Wind sunk off Skipper’s Rock, with our salvage boat moored above. The treasure is there, the link is completed” - another shrug from Ronjan - “and now we must begin all over.”
Cranston’s eyes denoted query.
“We approached from the wrong side,” explained Ronjan. “We took the lee side, thinking that the sand would have piled from windward. We were wrong, as Yuble will tell you.”
Ronjan gave a gesture toward a corner of the room and Margo furnished a half-gasp from the window. Margo knew who Yuble was, but she hadn’t realized that the man was here at all. On the few occasions that she had previously seen Dom Yuble, he had at least been conspicuous.
Now Yuble was rising from the corner chair where he had been a silent witness to proceedings. Whether he’d been here all along or had come in silently later, Margo couldn’t guess. However Cranston didn’t appear perturbed, probably because he was used to silent tactics himself.
Dom Yuble, sometimes called Captain Yuble, looked like something washed up from the Spanish Main after having been lost there a long, long time. He couldn’t be termed a chunk of human wreckage because he had stood the test of time. Rather he was stout timber that had hardened into iron.
Solid of build, taller than he looked because of his brawny proportions gave him extra width, Yuble had a face that was a study in itself. That face looked like something that had been molded soft by an apprentice, who had not done his job too well; then, discouraged, the moulder had left the job alone and it had set like cooling metal.
Not that Yuble’s features were permanently fixed; that applied only to two scars, one across his cheek, the other a jagged line at the side of his forehead. Yuble’s face was usually stolid simply because he had no reason to make it otherwise. When he wished, he smiled by parting his straight lips and showing the gleam of white teeth, but the smile had no particular expression and might have been interpreted in a dozen ways.
As for Yuble’s complexion, it too fitted the hardened softness of the man. Yuble was dark, or had been once, but his face had become so weather-beaten that its color was reduced to a peculiar tawn that almost matched an olive drab.
In a way, Yuble seemed the tropical equivalent of a New England fishing skipper whose face had become as rugged as the rocks of his own shore. In Yuble’s case, his features had taken on something of the look and contour of a coral reef.