“If you was to get all the dridgers from H’vana to Pensacola and dridged till your eyes bugged out o’ your head an’ your tongue hanged down to your heels, you wouldn’t clear her—siltin’—but she’s a sure enough mug trap.”
“How do you mean?”
“Why, with that story and that chart an’ that old foretop, I could set half Havana diggin’ like dogs for a bone, to say nothin’ of private parties an’ syndikits an’ such things—maybe I will, too, some day.”
They put out after breakfast for the Haliotis and another load of “old junk.” Satan rowed back with it, leaving Jude and Ratcliffe on board,—Ratcliffe collecting things forward, and Jude grubbing about in the saloon.
Having collected the odds and ends in a heap, he turned his eyes to the Sarah. Satan, having tied up the dinghy, was busy transhipping his plunder. Then the beauty of the morning sea flooding into the lagoon, held him for a moment. He followed the gulls in their flight, noted the sudden break from emerald to ultramarine deepening to purple, and beyond the reefs the sudden glitter of a leaping fish. Then he remembered Jude down below.
He came to the companionway and down the stairs.
The cabin was brilliant with sunlight, with water reflections through the open portholes playing on the ceiling and polished maple and venesta of the walls. Across a pile of truck and bunk bedding heaped on the table he caught a glimpse of the upper part of Jude.
Jude, fancying herself entirely alone, and yielding to some prompting or other, had picked up the despised go-ashore hat and put it on; she was looking at herself in the mirror fixed to the after bulkhead. She was looking at herself with her head now straight and now tilted slightly to one side; then the head turned, but she did not see Ratcliffe: her eyes were still fixed on the hat, she was looking at it sidewise.
All her unconscious movements might have been those of a lady in a milliner’s shop trying on a hat in a critical spirit.
She had not heard him coming down the companionway, owing to the fact that he was in his bare feet, and she did not hear him go up again.