CHAPTER XXX
A SECRET OF THE SAND
It seemed to Ratcliffe in the days that followed that he had never known what work meant before. That he, a wealthy and respected member of the British upper, upper-middle classes, an ex-Christ Churchman, and a member of Boodles, was assisting Satan Tyler in “tearing the tripes” out of another man’s yacht, also occurred to him sometimes as a fact, a distorted sort of fact, blurred and dimmed by the blazing and brilliant atmosphere in which they were working, the absolute and shocking loneliness that hemmed them in, Satan’s personality, and Jude’s companionship.
By all the laws of the sea, according to Satan, these things were the property of the first finder. That was all very well according to Satan, and indeed according to what seemed common-sense; still, sea law was for all he could tell not quite the same thing as the laws of the sea, according to Satan. Though belonging to a great ship-owning family, he knew nothing of the rights of the matter; but the business they were engaged on seemed to him sometimes, when he cared to think, most tremendously like larceny,—larceny excused by a lot of considerations and made picturesque by environment; still, a business that in the unpicturesque surroundings of the London Sessions would undoubtedly have appealed to a judge in the voice of Larceny.
Sometimes he imagined a warship, one of those prying, officious little cruisers that do police work, closing up with the cay and sending a boat into the lagoon.
Sometimes he fell to wondering what Seligmann was like,—an American surely, one of the Gulf haunters, belonging, most probably, to one of the numerous clubs on the Florida coast, and Mrs. Seligmann—or was it Miss—or not even that?
One thing was certain, Seligmann was rich. They were not robbing a poor man.
At the end of the third day Jude gave out, not from weariness, but from distaste.
“Lord! haven’t you had enough of this old truck?” said Jude. “I don’t feel’s if I ever wanted to see a len’th of rope nor a cringle again.”