The rum bottle had broken fairly in two without splinters.
“You might heave the bottle over, like a good one,” said Satan. “I can’t show on deck for fear of those shrimps seein’ me. It’ll be dark in an hour, and then I’ll be up. You can wait for your supper till we get away?”
“Oh, yes,” said Ratcliffe; “I’m in no hurry.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
TIDE AND CURRENT
He lit a pipe. Having disposed of the fragments of the bottle, he got the mop and a bucket of water and swabbed the rum-stained deck. Then he took his seat forward and watched the sunset.
The great sun, half-shorn of his beams and bulging broad as Jupiter, lolled above the reef in a sky of laburnum gold fading to aquamarine. Gulls, dark as withered leaves, blew about him, and shifting here and there to north and south became gulls of gold, while the wind blowing up from the gulf and the westward running current, meeting the last of the flood, broke the sea surface into a million tiny dancing waves, momentary mirrors dazzling the eye with shattered light.
Lone Reef seemed well named. Dawn or sunset or the blaze of full day could not take from its desolation, and this evening the sinister line of the wreck dominated everything, turning the blaze of sunset to the light of a funeral pyre.
The Sarah, moving to the swell, creaked and whimpered, and now and then from below he could hear voices,—Jude’s voice and the voice of Satan. Beyond that came the murmur of the reef and the clang of the gulls, and now and again a snatch of Spanish song from the Juan.