He handed the glass to Ratcliffe.
“Funny,” said Ratcliffe, “if you were right about the Nombre de Dios being sunk here and we come to have a look for her and find another wreck.”
“Well, I don’t take no shares in the Nombre de Dios,” said Satan. “I ran here more for somewhere to run to than with any thought of the Nombre. She’s a hundred foot under the sand if she’s here at all; but it’s luck all the same. There’ll be pickin’s. There was a big blow two weeks ago from the east,—that’s what’s done her,—and the salvage men won’t be here yet, if they ever come.”
He stuck the glass to his eye.
“She’s a yacht, that’s what she is, one of them small cruisers, not more’n fifty or sixty, and her fittin’s will just do for us, if she’s not been stripped. There’s all sorts of folks come from New York and Philadelphia and N’ y’Orleans, cruisin’ about these seas in tubs like that,—fishin’ mostly.”
The Sarah held on, almost due south, with the daring of a sea-bird, Satan giving directions to the steersman and seeming absolutely regardless of the death and dangers around them,—reefs that they shaved, rocks that waved fathom-long ribbons of fuci a few feet under water,—he avoided them all.
South, east, and west Cormorant Cay is devoid of danger. Only here to the north do the reefs and rocks show, and it is just here that the only entrance to the lagoon lies.
The place consists really of two sandspits widely separated to the north so as to form a pondlike harbor running from five to ten fathoms deep. Farther south the sandspits join so as to form a wide street, like the spit to eastward of Lone Reef.
They held on. The sound of the gentle surf on the sands came now, and a full view of the lagoon water reflecting the sun-blaze like a mirror.
On the still lagoon, with strange stereoscopic effect seen between the two sand-arms holding off the wrinkled sea, lay the craft, floating on an even keel, and showing a stump of mainmast against the skyline. From her lines she had been a yacht.