“Oh, Lord, no! I meant games, just ordinary games.”
Jude, the boat well beached, sat down on the blazing sands. It was two hours past noon, and the heat of the day had lifted under the freshening wind from the east, the tide was on the turn, and the far-off lamentations of the gulls around the southern reef-spurs came mixed with the fall of the waves,—waves scarcely a foot high, crystal clear, less waves than giant ripples.
Beyond the Sarah Tyler and her reflection on the water lay the violet-colored sea, infinity, and the blue of sky, broken only by a gull, spar white in the dazzle.
Ratcliffe sat down beside his companion. Jude, like any old salt, had her moments of dead laziness. Active as a kitten as a rule, she would suddenly knock off, when the fancy took her, “let go all holts,” to use Satan’s expression, and laze. You couldn’t kick her out of it, Satan said.
She had brought an old pair of boots for going through the bay cedar bushes. It wasn’t good to walk among the bushes unshod: there were tarantulas there, and scorpions, to say nothing of stump cacti. The boots were lying beside her on the sand, to be put on only at the last moment.
“What you mean by ordinary games?” asked Jude suddenly, finishing the inspection of a new variety of soft-shell crab she had just caught and flinging it into the sea.
“Oh, the games people play,” said Ratcliffe, who had almost forgotten what they had been talking about. He tried to explain, and found it singularly hard, especially when cross-examined.
Jude did not seem able to understand grown men and women spending half a day “knockin’ a ball about.”
“I used to play ma’bles with Dutch Mike’s kids when we were at Pensacola,” said she. “Mike ran a whisky joint, and the kids were pretty ornery. When we’d done playin’ marbles they’d have a cussin’ bee.”
“What on earth’s that?”