Ratcliffe could see squiggly-wiggly cuttlefish tendrils running up Satan’s arms as he delved in some of the rock-clefts, and Satan disengaging them and flinging the “mushy brutes” away. The big abalones were nearly always deep down under the rock ledges and had to be chiseled off, wallowing in the water. At these times Ratcliffe might have fancied the vanished one lost or drowned, but for the profane language that rose and floated away on the breeze.
All the same, it was dull work for the boat tender. Having nothing else to think of, he thought of Jude. Her figure chased away dullness.
A man in the bright and early morning is quite a different person from the same man at noon, and coming across Jude after a long course of Skelton was like stepping from a gray afternoon to dawn. Was it possible that Skelton and Jude were vertebrates of the same species?
Then there was what women would have called the pity of it. Ratcliffe did not deal much with the conventions as a rule; still, he could not but perceive that all life has an aim and ending, and that the end of an old sailor was not what life and the fitness of things had destined for Jude. What would she grow up into? He thought of all the girls he had ever known. There was not one so jolly as Jude; still, it was terrible, somehow, monstrous. He remembered her threat to pull her skirts over her head and run down the street if skirts were ever imposed upon her. Her contempt for the feminine rose up before him, and against all that her housewifely instincts and the fact that, despite Satan’s rope-end and mock bluster, she ruled the Sarah Tyler just as a woman rules a house.
Still, it was deplorable. Looking away into distance, what would become of her?
Vague and fatherly ideas of getting her away from this life and having her brought up properly and educated came to him, only to be dispelled by Jude. Imagine Jude in a girls’ school, at a tea party!
He was aroused from these meditations by Satan,—Satan with an armful of abalones, Satan scratched and bleeding and soused in sea water, but triumphant.
He reckoned they were the biggest “fish” ever got on these reefs. There were a dozen and six all told, and when they were collected and put on board the dinghy put back.
Coming round the western spur of the reef, they found that Jude had left the Sarah—a high crime—and rowed herself ashore.
The canvas boat was on the beach, and away amid the bay cedars and cactus toward the trees could be seen the head and shoulders of the deserter moving about. She seemed in search of something.