Leaving Satan and the old Sarah aside, and the extraordinary fascination of spars, sails, narrow deck, and close sea, catching one’s own fish, cooking one’s own food, and dickering with winds, waves, reefs, and lee shores for a living,—leaving all these aside, Jude alone would have held him; for Jude gave him what he possessed when he was nine,—the power of playing again, of seeing everything new and fresh. Washing up dishes with Jude was a game. To the whole-souled Jude all this business was a game,—hauling on the halyards, fishing, cooking, hanging on to the beard of a storm by the sea anchor, wreck picking and so on,—and she had infected him. Already they were good companions and, when together, of the same age, about nine—though she was fifteen and he over twenty.
“Stick them on that shelf,” said Jude. “Oh, Lord!—butter-fingers!—lemme! That’s the gadget to keep them from shiftin’ if the ship rolls. Now stick the knives in that locker. You don’t mind my tellin’ you, do you?”
“Not a bit.”
“Well, that’s all.”
They found Satan under the awning, attending to the gooseneck of the spare gaff.
Jude sat down on the deck clasping her knees, criticized Satan’s handiwork, received instructions to hold her tongue, and then collapsed, lying on her back with knees up and the back of her hand across her eyes. She could sleep at any odd moment.
The horizon had vanished in haze, the crying of the gulls had died down, and the washing of the lazy swell on the island beach sounded like a lullaby.
A trace of smoke was rising from the yellow funnel of the Dryad as she lay like a white painted ship on a blue painted ocean. They were firing up.
“How about getting ashore?” asked Ratcliffe. “I want to see that cache of yours. Care to come?”
“I’d just as soon leave it till they’re away,” said Satan, jerking his hand toward the Dryad. “There’s no tellin’, they might be spottin’ us on the location with a glass, and they’ll be off tonight—so the chap told me. You leave it to me and I’ll show you a cache better nor that in a day or two.”