Satan put down the pannikin and the brush. She evaded him like a flash and skimmed up the mast to the crosstrees.
Scarcely had she got up than she came sliding down, seized the toothbrush and pannikin, and began to brush her teeth over the scupper with a fire speed and fury that seemed born of dementia.
“Sardines comin’,” explained Jude between mouthfuls. “Look alive and get a bucket!”
Ratcliffe looked over the sea, where her birdlike sight had spotted the sardine shoal being driven like a gray cloud under the water by pursuing fish. A fringe of dancing silver showed the leaping sardines, and the great fish driving the shoal broke up now and then in sword-flashes.
They were coming from south to north, and the left wing of the shoal would pass the island beach by a cable length.
While Satan stood by with a bucket at the end of a rope, Ratcliffe hung over the side watching.
The driven sardines had no eyes for the Sarah. They struck her like the blow of a great silvery hand, boiled around her, and passed. The army of pursuit followed, passed and vanished, leaving the water clear and Satan with a dipped up bucket full of quivering silver.
The Tylers, absolutely blind to the wonder of the business, fried the sardines just as they were, tossed out of the blue sea into the frying pan, and, breakfast over, Satan and Ratcliffe took the dinghy to hunt for abalones on the uncovered reef.
The reefs to southward formed two spurs divided by a creek of blue water, and having got the dinghy into this creek Ratcliffe tended the boat while Satan hunted for the abalones.
Satan in search of pearls was a sight. Heart, soul, and mind bound up in the business, like a dog hunting for truffles, every find was announced by a yell or a whoop, like the whoop of a Red Indian.