“Can you make bread?” asked Jude after he had filled the tin kettle for her. “Well, you’ll have to learn. That’s the bakin’ powder in that big tin, and the flour’s in the starboard locker—What’re you doin’ with the tin? Land’s sake! You don’t think I’m goin’ to make bread for supper, same as you make tea? Where was you born?”
“Hampshire.”
“I thought it was somewhere like that,” said Jude.
She instructed him in the primitive method of bread making as conducted on board the Sarah Tyler, finishing up with the information that hardtack would be their portion at supper that night and breakfast next morning, as she was “up to the gunnel” in other business. Among the other things was having to put a patch on her trousers: not the ones she was wearing, which were her next best, but her worst. The old guernsey she was wearing was her second best. Coats! Oh, coats were good enough on Sunday or for going ashore in, but no use much in a ship, except an oilskin for dirty weather. Boots the same; stockings the same. You had to wear boots, of course, over rocks and through stuff like that over there on the island.
“Them pajamas” would be bully things to wear by day, only they’d frighten the fish. As for sleeping in such things, she’d just as soon seek the arms of Morpheus in a top hat. Why didn’t he wear a nighty like her and Satan? Pap’s eyes would have bugged out had he seen those things. He was “awful old fashioned,”—used to make her and Satan put cotton between their teeth every night. They did it still. She exhibited a set of dazzling white teeth to prove the fact. You just pulled a cotton thread between them, and then they never went rotten. Also he made them brush their teeth every morning. Folks that didn’t do that got toothache.
“Kettle’s boilin’,” suddenly finished Jude. “Now start in an’ let’s see you make the tea—said you could do it. There’s the can. Ain’t you goin’ to heat the pot first? How’re you to heat it? Let me have a hold. Now fling the water out. A spoonful a head and one for the pot and another one for Satan,—he likes it strong,—and if you’ll take it along to the cabin without spillin’ it I’ll be after you in a minute with the plates and things.”
Satan, who never put his hand to menial work, maintaining, without the least offense, his position as captain and owner, came down to supper, flushed with the good qualities of the dinghy. He had taken her for a row—and it was like hearing a man talking of a stroll with a sweetheart—if men ever talk of such things. Before going on deck to smoke he pointed out Ratcliffe’s quarters for the night. He was to have Pap’s cabin, the space divided off with a curtain. Jude and he always slept in hammocks swung in the “saloon.” Before going on deck he fetched an old canister out of a locker and, emptying some dried herbs into a saucer, set fire to them and left them smoldering on the table. It was to keep the mosquitoes away. Pap had got the receipt from a Seminole Indian up near Cedar Cays. It was patent stuff. Not a mosquito would come when there was a sniff of it in the air.
Then, just as the moon was rising, and after the things were washed up, they sat on deck, smoking, listening to the waves on the beach, and watching fish jumping in the track of the moon. They talked of fish, and to Ratcliffe’s mind two things became apparent,—Satan’s profound, awful knowledge of the sea and all that lived therein, and his absolute indifference to sport. Satan fished for food. Tarpon and tarpon fishermen filled him with disgust and disdain. You can’t eat tarpon, and the guys that came from New York and such places and spent their days fighting tarpon with a ten-ounce rod and a twenty-one-thread line seemed to him bereft of reason.
Jude, sitting on the deck and mending her pants by the light of the moon, concurred.
“But it’s the fun of the thing,” said Ratcliffe; “it’s the matching of one’s skill and strength against the fish.” He talked of the joys of salmon fishing.