"So she would adventure death," he reflected. "Almost at as light a whisper from the powers of darkness, too."
They were no sooner ashore than the girl tugged at his hand to stay him. The jeweler's glass front had intrigued her eye, for there, displayed against canary plush, was a string of pearls, like winter moons for size and luster. Her speaking eye flashed on them and her slim fingers twisted and untwisted at her back. She lifted her head and with her forefinger traced a pleading circle round her throat.
A dark cloud came over Rackby's features. These were the pearls, he knew at once, which Caddie Sills had sold in the interest of Cap'n Dreed so long ago. They were a luckless purchase on the part of the jeweler. All the women were agreed that such pearls had bad luck somewhere on the string, and no one had been found to buy.
"Why does he display them at this time of all times, in the face and eyes of everybody?" thought the harbor master.
A laugh sounded behind him. It was Deep-water Peter, holding a gun in one hand, and a dead sheldrake in the other. The red wall of the Customs House bulged over him.
"Ah, there, Jethro!" he said. "Have you married the sea at last and taken a mermaid home to live?"
"This is my daughter, if you please," said Jethro Rackby. An ugly glint was in his usually gentle eye, but he did not refuse the outstretched hand. "You have prospered seemingly."
"Oh, I have enough to carry me through," said Peter. "I picked up a trifle here, and a trifle there, and a leetle pinch from nowhere, just to salt it down. And so all this time you've been harbor master here?"
His tone was between contempt and tolerance, as befitted the character formed in a harder school, and the harbor master was bitterly silent.
Day had turned from the jewels and was coming toward her father. When she saw the strange man beside him she stopped short and averted her face, not before observing that Rackby might have passed for Peter's father.