“Leave them alone or I’ll bat y’ with the bailer! Well, let them lay on deck if they’re there. She’s a duck, new built too,—teak, copper fastenin’s, all the best that money could buy. Stop rockin’ her and over you get after the cushions.”
Jude came clambering on board, beaming in the sunset, then she got one of the boat’s cushions and took her seat on it on the deck beside Ratcliffe.
“I reckon old Popplecock’s as soft as his cushions, to be wangled out of a boat like that,” said Jude, examining the sole of her bare right foot for a fancied splinter. “Satan said he was goin’ to try it on him when you were down below with him. Didn’t believe he’d do it. That chap looked as stiff as his own mainmast—but there’s no tellin’—Say, I heard what you said to him when you were down below.”
“Oh, did you?”
“I wasn’t listenin’: I just heard through the skylight. I heard you sayin’ you liked us and the old Sarah better’n him and his boat—what makes likin’s?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nuther do I; but we took to you right off, same as you to us. Ever done abalone fishin’?”
“No.”
“Well, I reckon you won’t want to do it again, once you’ve tried. There’ll be a big low tide tomorrow after sun-up, and you’ll have a chance of seein’ what it is. Finished your pipe? Well, come along and help us to get supper.”
For all the work Ratcliffe did, she might have got the supper herself. He was mostly in the way; but it was the companionship that helped. Brothers aren’t much good as companions. Ratcliffe was a new thing, absolutely new, from his striped pajamas and dandy clothes to his condition of mind, just as she was a new thing to Ratcliffe. Never did two beings come together so well or create more rapidly a little world of mutual interests out of the little things of life, or a weaker being dominate more completely the stronger.