“It’s the Nombre de Dios, maybe,” said Ratcliffe.
“Maybe,” said Jude. “It’s the foretop of an old ship, anyhow. See, where the mast’s broke off—she’s thirty or forty foot under that.”
“Not much good to us, even if she is the Nombre de Dios.”
“Not much.”
The gulls seemed to agree, and the little waves, falling crystal clear on the beach.
It was near the end of the spit just here, and the sands shelved out, losing themselves in the immeasurable loneliness of the sea stretching to Mariguana and the Caicos and the northern shoulder of South America.
Jude, on her knees with a bit of driftwood, was scraping away the sand from the edge of the sunk foretop, when something caught her eye.
A turtle had landed where they had marked the eggs. It was so far away that it did not look bigger than a threepenny bit.
She flung the bit of driftwood away, rose to her feet, and started running, taking the extreme sea-edge where the sand was hard. Ratcliffe followed. They were half a minute too late, the turtle turning back to the sea and leaving them spent and laughing. She got down on her knees and hived the eggs in her hat still laughing. He helped, filling his hat and his pockets, and then they started for the lagoon edge, Jude suddenly in the wildest spirits. He had never seen her in such high, good spirits. When they got aboard it was just the same. Even Satan’s maniacal passion for old junk, expressed at supper in the determination to spend two more days picking and scraping at the Haliotis, did not depress her, it only made her laugh.
“You’ll be cryin’ before you’ve done if you go on laughin’ like that,” said Satan. “What’s possessed you eh?”