“Now then,” said Kearney, noting the fact, and not for the first time, that the child had allowed for refraction, “shoulder your stick an’ come along. We’ve no time to be playin’—Christmas!”
A crab with a body the size of a penny bun and legs three feet long had elevated itself from a cleft in the coral after the fashion of a camera when set up; it seemed to take a snapshot of the oncomers and then, legs in a hurry and body wobbling as if on springs, passed over into the water on the lagoon side.
“Crab!” cried Dick.
The length of the legs differentiated the creature from its fellows. It looked more like a huge spider than a crab, but the reef craft born in the child was not to be deceived. The movement of the creature was enough for him.
The pool beyond held a trapped Jew-fish which fell a victim to Mr. Kearney, owing to the fact that the pool itself was small. In the great pools, floored with sand and showing the silvery gleam of mullet and the scarlet of rock cod, little or nothing could be done with the spear.
It did not matter; the lines gave them all the fish they wanted from the lagoon, and this business was more in the nature of sport.
They wandered along in the blazing sunshine inspecting the pools and exploring the pot-holes, killing squids and turning over the heaps of coloured fuci left by the outgoing tide. A polished rock would sometimes move, disclose itself as a hawk-bill turtle and plunge into a pool. Shells of crabs and whelks lay everywhere, and great haliotis shells empty of everything but the whisper of the sea. Here, amongst the weeds, you could find the sucker claws of octopi, big as the claws of a tiger, and there, on the slab coral polished like window glass by the washing of the sea, huge sea-slugs the size of parsnips.
Kearney preferred the reef to the island. There was “more air” and, as a rule, out here he was lost to everything but the interests around him, pleased as the child with the ever-varying wonders of the place. There was always something new left by the tide. Last time in the biggest of the pools a chambered nautilus was sailing like a lost galleon, the most exquisite dream of Nature; a bit beyond they had come upon the skull of a whale, whose tongue had been torn out by orcas and whose body had been devoured by sharks.
To-day, however, Mr. Kearney seemed to have little interest in the business of the reef. He was bothered. Lestrange had been going very much to pieces of late, physically more than mentally. His heart was troubling him. Sometimes he would be all right, and sometimes he would have to sit down to rest after a little exertion. He had “gone baggy” under the eyes and wasn’t himself at all. The fact that the schooner was getting long overdue did not help matters.
Kearney, as he prodded about in the pools, would sometimes stand erect and gaze away off into the north, but in the north there was nothing but the brimming sea, broken only by the wing of a distant gull.