She was shedding her canvas; and now a glow-worm spark, golden in the silver of the moonlight, climbed up and became stationary but for the lift and fall of the swell as she rode at her moorings. It was her anchor light.
He listened for voices. None came. Then he saw a lantern being carried along her deck. It vanished, probably through a hatch.
Then he went below, and, dropping asleep the instant he turned in, dreamt that he was marooned on Palm Island with Skelton, and Skelton was trying to hang him on a palm tree for a pirate, and the gulls were shouting “Seven fathom!—seven fathom—seven fathom!” Then came oblivion and the sleep of youth that defies dreams.
CHAPTER II
A FLOATING CARAVAN
Next morning, an hour after sunrise, Ratcliffe came on deck in his pajamas,—gorgeous blue and crimson striped pajamas,—a sight for the gods.
The sky was cloudless. The wind of the night before had fallen to a tepid breathing scarcely sufficient to stir the flag at the jackstaff, and from all that world of new-born blue and mirror-calm sea there came not a sound but the sound of the gulls crying and quarreling about the reef spurs of the island.
Amid the glory of light and color and against the palms and white beach lay the ghost of the night before, a frowzy-looking yawl-rigged boat of fifty feet or so, a true hobo of the sea, with wear and weather written all over her and an indescribable something that marked her down even to Ratcliffe as disreputable.
Simmons, the second officer, was on deck.