The sound of a guitar came through the dusk, crossing the warm wind, the lazy, languorous wind of a perfect summer’s night. Seville, which he had never seen, rose before Ratcliffe, firefly-haunted orange groves, lovely women all skewered together by the remembered words of a ribald song.
“When I was a student at Cadiz!”
“There goes old Catguts,” said Satan. “He’s the band aboard the Juan,—Antonio, Alonzo, Alphonso—damn his name!”
“It ain’t,” said Jude. “It’s that old copper-patch Cleary’s got with him. I’ve heard him in harbor. I gave him a plug of tobacco once for getting me some bait, and he showed me the thing. It’s got a crack in it or suthin’, and makes a noise like a skeeter in a jug,—kind a fizzin’ noise between the plonks. He’s got an ulster on his leg so’s you can see the bone. He took off the rags an’ showed me—he’s a Portugee.”
“Well, it’s time to get busy,” said Satan. “Here, h’ist yourself and lend a hand!”
Ratcliffe got more forward while they knocked the shackle off the chain. There came a splash. Then the meeting resumed.
“If they heard that splash,” said Satan, “they’d put it down to a fish jumpin’. Now you watch them lights.”
Ratcliffe watched the amber lights of the Natchez and Juan. They did not seem to alter position in the least. In the first of the starlight and the last of the dusk the spars and hulls of the two vessels could just be made out.
Then presently he saw that the lights had drawn a bit more aft and seemed closer together. The feel of the Sarah was different too, she moved more freely to the swell.
The sound of the guitar seemed slightly fainter.