“I’d pull them over me head and run down the street if anyone ever stuck skirts on me,” said Jude. “I’d as soon go about in them pajamas of yours.”
Ratcliffe was silent for a moment. It amazed him the familiarity that had suddenly sprung up between himself and these two.
“Won’t you come aboard and have a look around?” asked Tyler, as though suddenly stricken with the sense of his own inhospitality.
“But the boat?”
“Stream her on a line—over with a line, Jude!”
A line came smack into the dinghy, and Ratcliffe tied it to the painter ring. Next moment he was on board, and the dinghy, taking the current, drifted astern.
No sooner had his feet touched the deck of the Sarah Tyler than he felt himself encircled by a charm. It seemed to him that he had never been on board a real ship before this. The Dryad was a structure of steel and iron, safe and sure as a railway train, a conveyance, a mechanism made to pound along against wind and sea; as different from this as an aëroplane from a bird.
This little deck, these high bulwarks, spars, and weather-worn canvas,—all them collectively were the real thing. Daring and distance and freedom and the power to wander at will, the inconsequence of the gulls,—all these were hinted at here. Old man Tyler had built the boat, but the sea had worked on her and made her what she was, a thing part of the sea as a puffin.
Frowzy looking at a distance, on deck the Sarah Tyler showed no sign of disorder. The old planking was scrubbed clean and the brass of the little wheel shone. There was no raffle about, nothing to cumber the deck but a boat,—the funniest-looking boat in the world.
“Canvas built,” said Tyler, laying his hand on her; “Pap’s invention; no more weight than an umbrella. No, she ain’t a collapsible: just canvas and hickory and cane. That’s another of Pap’s dodges over there, that sea anchor, and there’s ’nother, that jigger for raising the mudhook. Takes a bit of time, but half a man could work it, and I reckon it would raise a battleship. There’s the spare, same as the one that’s in the mud—ever see an anchor like that before? Pap’s. It’s a patent, but he was done over the patentin’ of it by a shark in Boston.”