They watched Skelton getting on board, and then they saw the dinghy lowered and the quarter-boat taking her in tow. In five minutes, like a white duckling behind a moor-hen, she was streaming on a line behind the Sarah and the quarter-boat was pulling back for the yacht.
Satan had got his wish, and Ratcliffe was feeling just as Skelton wanted him to feel, under a compliment and rather a beast. Then they saw the boat taken on board and the hands laying aloft and the canvas shaking out to the favoring breeze.
“He’ll have the wind right aft, and that’ll save his coal,” said Satan. “I reckon if his engines give out he wouldn’t bother much, with all that canvas to carry him.”
“They’re handlin’ it smart,” said Jude. “There’s the anchor goin’ up.”
The flurried sound of the steam winch raising the anchor came across the water, then it ceased, and Jude, running to the flag locker, fetched out a dingy old American flag, bent it on, and ran it up, dipping it as the Dryad began to move.
She returned the compliment, gliding away with the bow-wash beginning to show and the wake creaming behind her. As she passed the southern reefs and shifted her helm, squaring her yards to the following wind, a blast from her siren raised a blanket of shouting gulls. Then the island cut her off and the sea lay desolate.
The sense of his loneliness came on Ratcliffe, sudden as the clap of a door. He had cut the painter with civilization. The deck of the Sarah Tyler seemed smaller than ever, Jude and Satan more irresponsible and unaccountable, and his own daring a new thing, somewhat dubious. He had renounced services and delicacies and surety of passage and safety, letters and newspapers, everything he had known! The shock scarcely lasted a minute, and then, with the breeze across the pansy-blue evening sea, came blowing the wind of Adventure and Freedom.
Then in a moment some spirit explained to him what life really meant,—life as the Argonauts knew it, as the gulls know it, freedom in the intense and living moment, without a thought of yesterday, with scarcely a care for the morrow.
He took his seat in an old chair that Satan had placed under the rag of awning and lit his pipe. That delightful smoke seemed the culmination of everything in these first moments in this new world. As he smoked he watched the Tylers, who were so busy with their own affairs that they seemed to have forgotten him. They had hauled the dinghy alongside, then they got into her and were lost to sight; but he could hear their voices, Jude’s shrill with pleasure and excitement.
“My! Ain’t she a beauty? Ain’t she a dinky boat? My! look at the cushions!” A laugh. “For the love of Mike look at the cushions—cushions in a boat! Heave ’em on deck!” The cushions came flying over the rail, together with the voice of Satan, evidently bending.