“Where’s Rat?”
“He’s comin’.”
He sat down to table opposite Jude. She scarcely gave him good morning. The face that had looked so well framed by the porthole of the dream ship was cross, almost sullen. He thought for a moment that her ill-temper was directed toward Satan as well as himself; then, in some subtle way, he knew it wasn’t. Early rising may have helped; but he was the cause. What had he done? He could not think.
He remembered how she had acted when he had stood up for her the night before. It was just the same this morning.
Satan said the coffee was burnt,—tasted like bud barley, and ought to be slung in the slush tub. Ratcliffe stood up for the coffee, but was cut short by Jude.
“I reckon it’s beastly,” said Jude; “but I haven’t more’n two hands to be gettin’ the things on the table and the coffee boiled—and some folks snoring in their bunks!”
“Shet up!” said Satan, ruffled at this wanton attack on the guest “And talkin’ of snorin’, I reckon you can give any man points and beat him, once you lay down to it. Why, you shake the ship so that I’ve woke often of nights thinkin’ we’d got adrift and was dudderin’ over sandbanks.”
“Lord love you for a liar!” was all Jude said. She refused help in clearing away the things, joining them on deck a few minutes later, just as day was coming into the eastern sky.
The problem of how to get the dinghy aboard had not occurred to Ratcliffe till now. The Sarah Tyler possessed no davits, and though the old canvas boat was easy to handle as an umbrella, the sturdy little dinghy was a different matter.
Standing in the half-dark with a faint wind bringing the smell of the early morning sea, sharp as the smell of a new-drawn sword, he questioned Satan on the subject.