“How’d you mean?”
“Oh, just that. I’m bothering about when this cruise is over. That’s bothering me a lot. Well, we’ll leave it at that for the present.”
Satan turned his lantern face to starboard for half a moment to expectorate right over the starboard rail—maybe also to hide a grin.
“I reckon it’ll come all right somehow,” said he. “We ain’t much in the world, but we’re straight. Reckon you’re straight too. That’s all I want. That feller Thelusson, y’remember I told you he wanted to come for a cruise with us. Well, he was straight enough s’far as dollars went, but I wouldn’t have had him on this ship, not if he’d paid me a dollar a minute and a bonus for every knot we made—not with Jude aboard—Here’s the wheel for a sec’, if you’ll take it whiles I get some coffee ready.”
Toward noon a wreath of gulls in the sky showed Cormorant.
Jude was at the wheel, Satan forward on the lookout.
Twenty minutes later Satan came running aft, fetched the old glass out of its sling, and went forward with it.
“There’s a hooker on the sands!” cried he. “Looks like a small fruiter or suthin’ hove up.”
Ratcliffe, standing beside him, could see nothing,—the sand, owing to their low level, was invisible from the deck of the Sarah,—then, straining his eyes, he made out a speck on the sea-line.
“Mast’s gone,” said Satan, “white painted, not more’n fifty ton, and she’s layin’ in the lagoon. She must have come in over the sand where it narrows to the westward. There’s a pinch of sand there that’s near under water at flood, and the seas come right over it in an east’ard gale.”