Then, bundling the food and the water jar into the dinghy, they started.
He took the sculls at first, Jude steering, her eyes fixed ahead under the shade of her old panama. She could tell exactly the spot where the spit lay. She could not see it, but she could see in the sky now and then over there a faint trace like a haze of smoke that formed, vanished and reformed,—gulls.
Occasionally she looked back where the deserted Sarah Tyler lay, with the Juan seeming now close beside her and the reef behind them. Smaller and smaller they grew and more vast the ocean, an infinity of blazing lazulite, without horizon, silent, but sonorous with light.
The current was with them.
Satan had made a small mast and lug sail for the dinghy. That was the job he had been engaged on while Jude and Ratcliffe had landed on Palm Island to get provisions from the cache. He had worked with all the care of a fond mother making a garment for a beloved child. The little mast, scraped and varnished, the sail made of an extra special bit of stuff wheedled from Thelusson, were in the boat, and, a breeze now springing up from the sou’west, Jude gave orders to step the mast. Then she took the sheet, he slipped from his seat to the bottom of the boat, and the dinghy, bending to the three-knot breeze, lifted to the gentle swell.
A great herring hog passed them, plunging like a dolphin, and a flying fish with blind, staring eyes missed the sail by a hand’s breadth and flickered into the sea ahead; then a strange-looking gull swooped toward them from nowhere, hung for a moment with domed wings, honey-colored against the sun, and passed with a cry into the great silence, a silence broken only by the slap and tinkle of the water against the planking.
Ratcliffe lit his pipe. Jude, steering, seemed to have forgotten her last trace of grudge against him, forgotten Satan and the jumper and the fact that she had been left to her lonesome while they had been playing on the reef and her desire to cut the whole show and start a “la’ndry.” She seemed just now a different person, companionable and friendly and sane, as though the cooking and cleaning and the worries and troubles of the Sarah had been lifted like a dish-cover from her prisoned soul.
It was the first time they had been really alone together, and the companionship that springs from loneliness helped.
The gull reminded her of gulls she had seen on the Louisiana coast where the cypress swamps come down to meet the sea and you could hear “the bullfrogs shoutin’ all night, ‘Paddy got drunk, Paddy got drunk, Paddy got drunk,’ and the other chaps answering up, ‘Bottle of rum, bottle of rum, bottle of rum,’ and the ’gaters would come alongside grinding against the planking sniffing for bits—ever seen a ’gater?”
“Only stuffed.”