“Yep.”
“But we hadn’t to make no cache hole,” put in Jude. “Pap had one here. It’s among the bushes—and he didn’t make it, neither.”
“It’s all coral rock a foot under the bushes,” said Tyler, “and there’s a hole you drop down six foot, that leads to a cave as cool as a refrigerator; so the goods would keep to the last trumpet. The old Spaniards must have cut it to hide their stuff in. Pap dropped on it by chance. Said they’d used it for hidin’ gold and such. Not that he believed in the buried treasure business—sunk ships is different.”
Jude, who was hacking open a can of peaches, suddenly made an awful face at Satan. It had the effect of cutting him short. Ratcliffe refused the peaches. He sat watching this pair of cormorants and thinking that the cache must be pretty big if it held two years’ provisions for them.
Then suddenly he said so, laughing and without giving the least offense. Tyler explained that the cache was not their only larder: there were fish and turtle and turtle eggs, birds sometimes, fruit to be had for next to nothing, often for nothing. The only expense was for tobacco, and he had not paid ten cents for tobacco since last fall and wouldn’t want to for a year to come; clothes, and they didn’t want much clothes, Jude did the mending and patching; paint, and the Sarah Tyler had ways and means of getting paint and all such, spars and so on. He gave a wonderful instance:
Before Christmas last they had chummed up with a big yacht on the Florida coast near Cedar Cays. Thelusson was the owner, a man from New York. He took a fancy to the Sarah and her way of life, and he and his crew helped to careen her in a lagoon back of the reefs, cleaned her copper (she was dead foul with barnacles and weeds), gave her a new main boom and foresail and some spare canvas, and all for nix. He had no paint, or he would have painted her. He drank champagne by the bucket, and he wanted to quit the yacht and go for a cruise with them, only his missus who was on board wouldn’t let him.
Ratcliffe thought he could visualize Thelusson.
“She was a mutt,” put in Jude, “with a voice like a muskeeter.”
“She wanted to ’dopt Jude and stick a skirt on her,” said Tyler.
“Handed me out a lot of sick stuff about sayin’ prayers and such,” hurriedly cut in Jude.