"Dynamite, is it? Good. If it's old Chatelard, he ought to blow up. Serve him right."
"I'm surprised and pained at your words, my dear friend. No soul is utterly—"
"Yes, it is. Which way did he go? Where is he?"
"I don't know. The manager sent me to inform the sheriff."
"It won't do any good. But you'd better go, all the same."
The judge in chancery went on his dignified way. He would not have hurried if he had heard Angel Gabriel's trump. The news he had brought was in the class to be considered important if true, but there was nothing in it to alter Jimmy's plans. He took the shortest cut to the shore, found a fiat-bottomed punt that was regarded by the village as general property, and pushed off.
The Sea Gull was a tidy craft, and looked very gay with even the half of her festival flags on view. But the gaiety did not beguile Jim's dampened spirits. He went aboard feeling that he'd like to rip the idiotic things down; but the yacht, at least, offered a place where he could think. The sunset light on the water blazed vermilion—just the color that Jim all at once discovered he hated. He looked down the companionway, but finally he decided to stretch out on deck for a few minutes' rest. He was very tired.
Off in the stern was a vague mass which proved to be a few yards of canvas carefully tented on the floor. Some gimcrack belonging to the ship's ornamentation had been freshly gilded and left to dry, protected by an old sail-cloth. This, weighted down by a rusty marlinespike, spread couchwise along the taffrail, and offered to Jim just the bed he longed for.
He lay down, face to the sky, and gave himself up to thoughts that were very dark indeed. He had been thrown down, unexpectedly and quite hard, and that was all there was to it. Agatha, lovely but inexplicable maid, was not for him. She had been deceptive—yes, that was the word; and he had been a fool—that was the plain truth. He might as well face it at once. He had been idiot enough to think he might win the girl. Just because they had been tossed together in mid-ocean and she had clung to him. The world wasn't an ocean; it was a spiritual stock-exchange, where he who would win must bid very high indeed for the prizes of life. And he had so little to bid!
Communing thus with his unhappiness, Jim utterly lost the sense of time. The shameless vermilion sunset went into second mourning and thence to nun's gray, before the figure on the sail-cloth moved. Then, through senses only half awake, Jim heard a light sound, like a scratch-scratch on the hull of the yacht. Chamberlain, no doubt, just rubbing the nose of his tender against the Sea Gull. Jim was in no hurry to see Chamberlain, and remained where he was. The Englishman would heave in sight soon enough.