Next morning, an hour after sunrise, Ratcliffe came on deck in his pajamas,—gorgeous blue and crimson striped pajamas,—a sight for the gods.

The sky was cloudless. The wind of the night before had fallen to a tepid breathing scarcely sufficient to stir the flag at the jackstaff, and from all that world of new-born blue and mirror-calm sea there came not a sound but the sound of the gulls crying and quarreling about the reef spurs of the island.

Amid the glory of light and color and against the palms and white beach lay the ghost of the night before, a frowzy-looking yawl-rigged boat of fifty feet or so, a true hobo of the sea, with wear and weather written all over her and an indescribable something that marked her down even to Ratcliffe as disreputable.

Simmons, the second officer, was on deck.

“She must have come in last night,” said Simmons. “Some sea scraper or another working between the islands—Spanish most likely.”

“No, she’s not Spanish,” said Ratcliffe. “I saw her come in and I heard them shouting the soundings in English—look! there’s a chap fishing from her.” The flash of a fish being hauled on board had caught his eye and fired his passion for sport. They had done no fishing from the Dryad.

He borrowed the dinghy from Simmons and, just as he was, put off.

“Ask them to sell some of their fish, if they’ve any to spare,” cried Simmons as the dinghy got away.

“Ay, ay!” replied Ratcliffe.

The sea blaze almost blinded him as he rowed with the gulls flying round and shouting at him. As he drew up to the yawl the fisherman lugged another fish on board. The fisherman was a boy, a dirty-faced boy, in a guernsey, and as the dinghy came alongside he stared at the pajama-clad one as at an apparition.

“Hullo, there!” cried Ratcliffe, clawing on with the boathook.

“Hullo, yourself!” replied the other.

“Any fish for sale?”

“Any what?”

“Fish.”

The boy disappeared. Then came his voice, evidently shouting down a hatch.

“Satan, below there!”

“Hullo!”

“Here’s the funniest guy come alongside wants to know if we’ve got fish to sell him. Show a leg!”

“One minute,” replied the second voice.

The boy reappeared at the rail in the burning sunlight. “The cap will be up in a minute,” said he. “What in the nation are you got up like that for?” “What?”

“Them things.”

Ratcliffe laughed.

“I forgot I was in my pajamas. I must apologize.”

“What’s pajamas?”

“My sleeping suit.”

“You sleep in them things?”

“Of course.”

“Well, I’m damned!” said the boy. Then he gave a sudden yell of laughter and vanished, sitting down on the deck evidently, while another form appeared at the rail, a lantern-jawed, long-haired, youthful figure, rubbing the sleep out of its eyes. It stared at the occupant of the dinghy, then it opened its mouth and uttered one word:

“Moses!”

“He sleeps in them things!” came a half-strangled voice from the deck. “Satan, hold me up, I’m dyin’!”

“Shut your beastly head!” said Satan. Then to Ratcliffe, “Don’t be minding Jude,—Jude’s cracked,—but you sure are gotten up—Say, you from that hooker over there?”

“Yes.”

“What are you?”

“Nothing.”

Another explosion from the deck, stifled by a kick from Satan.

“But what are you doing here, anyway?”

Ratcliffe explained, Satan leaning comfortably on the rail and listening. “A yacht—well, we’re the Sarah Tyler. Pap and me and Jude used to run the boat. He died last fall. Tyler was his name, and Satan Tyler’s mine. He said I yelled like Satan when a pup and he put the name on me—Say, that’s a dandy boat. I’m wanting a boat like that. Will you trade?”

“She’s not mine.”

“That don’t matter,” said Tyler with a laugh. “But I forgot: you aren’t in our way of business.”

“What’s your way of business?”

“Lord! Shut up, Satan!” came the voice from the deck.

“Well, Pap was one thing or another; but we’re respectable, ain’t we, Jude?”

“Passons to what Pap was,” agreed the voice in a quieter tone, and it came to Ratcliffe that the figure of Jude remained invisible, being ashamed to show itself after having guyed him.

“We’re out of Havana, and we scratch round and make a living,” went on Tyler, “and the boat being ours we make out. There’s lots to be had on these seas for the looking.”

“Do you work the boat alone?”

“Well, we had a nigger to help since Pap died. He skipped at Pine Island a fortnight ago. Since then we’ve made out. Jude’s worth a man and don’t drink—”

“Who says I don’t drink?” Two grimy hands seized the rail and the body and face of Jude raised themselves. Then the whole apparition hung, resting midriff high across the rail, just balanced, so that a tip from behind would have sent it over.

“Who says I don’t drink? How about Havana Harbor last trip?”

“They gave her rum,” said Satan gloomily, “gave her rum in a doggery down by the waterside—curse the swabs! I laid two of them flat and then got her aboard.”

“Her!” said Ratcliffe.

“Blind, wasn’t I?” cut in Jude hurriedly.

“Blind you were,” said Tyler.

Jude grinned. Ratcliffe thought he had never met with a stranger couple than these two, especially Jude. Hanging on with the boathook, he contemplated the dirty, daring face whose fine, gray, long-lashed eyes were the best features.

“How old are you?” asked he, addressing it.

“Hundred an’ one,” said Jude. “Ask me another.”

“She’s fifteen and a bit,” said Tyler, “and as strong as a grown man.”

“I thought she was a boy,” said Ratcliffe.

“So I am,” said Jude. “Girls is trash. I’m not never goin’ to be a girl. Girls is snots!”

As if to prove her boyhood, she hung over the rail so that he feared any moment she might tumble.

“She’s a girl, right enough,” said Tyler as if they were discussing an animal, “but God help the skirts she ever gets into!”

“I’d pull them over me head and run down the street if anyone ever stuck skirts on me,” said Jude. “I’d as soon go about in them pajamas of yours.”

Ratcliffe was silent for a moment. It amazed him the familiarity that had suddenly sprung up between himself and these two.

“Won’t you come aboard and have a look around?” asked Tyler, as though suddenly stricken with the sense of his own inhospitality.

“But the boat?”

“Stream her on a line—over with a line, Jude!”

A line came smack into the dinghy, and Ratcliffe tied it to the painter ring. Next moment he was on board, and the dinghy, taking the current, drifted astern.

No sooner had his feet touched the deck of the Sarah Tyler than he felt himself encircled by a charm. It seemed to him that he had never been on board a real ship before this. The Dryad was a structure of steel and iron, safe and sure as a railway train, a conveyance, a mechanism made to pound along against wind and sea; as different from this as an aËroplane from a bird.

This little deck, these high bulwarks, spars, and weather-worn canvas,—all them collectively were the real thing. Daring and distance and freedom and the power to wander at will, the inconsequence of the gulls,—all these were hinted at here. Old man Tyler had built the boat, but the sea had worked on her and made her what she was, a thing part of the sea as a puffin.

Frowzy looking at a distance, on deck the Sarah Tyler showed no sign of disorder. The old planking was scrubbed clean and the brass of the little wheel shone. There was no raffle about, nothing to cumber the deck but a boat,—the funniest-looking boat in the world.

“Canvas built,” said Tyler, laying his hand on her; “Pap’s invention; no more weight than an umbrella. No, she ain’t a collapsible: just canvas and hickory and cane. That’s another of Pap’s dodges over there, that sea anchor, and there’s ’nother, that jigger for raising the mudhook. Takes a bit of time, but half a man could work it, and I reckon it would raise a battleship. There’s the spare, same as the one that’s in the mud—ever see an anchor like that before? Pap’s. It’s a patent, but he was done over the patentin’ of it by a shark in Boston.”

“He must have been a clever man,” said Ratcliffe.

“He was,” said Tyler. “Come below.”

The cabin of the Sarah Tyler showed a table in the middle, a hanging bunch of bananas, seats upholstered in some sort of leather, a telltale compass fixed in the ceiling, racks for guns and nautical instruments, and a bookcase holding a couple of dozen books. A sleeping cabin guarded by a curtain opened aft. Nailed to the bulkhead by the bookcase was an old photograph in a frame, the photograph of a man with a goatee beard, shaggy eyebrows, and a face that seemed stamped out of determination—or obstinacy.

“That’s him,” said Jude.

“Your father?”

“Yep.”

“It was took after Mother bolted,” said Tyler.

“She took off with a long-shore Baptis’ minister,” said Jude. “Said she couldn’t stand Pap’s unbelievin’ ways.”

“He made her work for him in a laundry,” said Tyler.

“It was at Pensacola, up the gulf, and a year after, when we fetched up there again, she came aboard and died. Pap went for the Baptis’ man.”

“He wasn’t any more use for a Baptis’ minister when Pap had done with him,” said Jude. “That’s his books—Pap’s. There’s dead loads more in the spare bunk in there.”

Ratcliffe looked at the books. Old man Tyler’s mentality interested him almost as much as the history of the Tyler family,—“Ben Hur,” Paine’s “Age of Reason” and “Rights of Man,” Browne’s “Popular Mechanics,” “The Mechanism of the Watch,” “Martin Chuzzlewit,” and some moderns, including an American edition of “Jude the Obscure.”

“Some of those came off a wreck he had the pickin’s of,” said Tyler, “a thousand-tonner that went ashore off Cat Island.”

“That was before Jude was born,” said Ratcliffe.

“Lord! how do you know that?” said Jude.

Ratcliffe laughed and pointed to the book. “It’s the name on that book,” said he. “I didn’t know: I just guessed.”

“I reckon you’re right,” said Tyler, opening a locker and fetching out cups and saucers and plates and dumping them on the table. “Not that it matters much where it come from, but you’ve got eyes in your head, that’s sure. Say, you’ll stay to breakfast, now you’re aboard?” “I’d like to,” said Ratcliffe, “but I ought to be getting back: they won’t know what’s become of me. And besides I’m in these.”

“That’s easy fixed,” said Tyler. “Jude, tumble up and take the boat over to the hooker and say the gentleman is stayin’ to breakfast an’ll be back directly after. I’ll fix him for clothes.”

Jude vanished, and Tyler, going into the after-cabin, rousted out an old white drill suit of “Pap’s” and a pair of No. 9 canvas shoes.

“They’re new washed since he wore them,” said Tyler. “Slip ’em on over your what’s his names and come along and lend me a hand in the galley—can you cook?”

“You bet!” said Ratcliffe.

Eased in his mind as to the Dryad, the boy in him rose to this little adventure, delightful after weeks of routine and twenty years of ordered life and high respectability. He had caravaned, yachted in a small way, fancied that he had at all events touched the fringe of the Free Life—he had never been near it. These sea gipsies in their grubby old boat were It! A grim suspicion that these remains of the Tyler family sailed sometimes pretty close to the law and that their sea pickings were, to put it mildly, various did not detract in the least from their charm. He guessed instinctively they were not rogues of a bad sort. The lantern-jawed Satan had not the face of a saint. There were indications in it indeed of the possibility of a devilish temper no less than a desperate daring, but not a trace of meanness. Jude was astonishingly and patently honest, while old man Tyler, whose presence seemed still to linger on in this floating caravan, had evident titles, of a sort, to respect.

He was helping to fry fish over the oil-stove in the little galley when Jude returned with the information, delivered through the shouting of the frying pan, that everything was all right, and the message had been delivered to a “guy” in a white coat who was hanging his fat head over the starboard rail of the Dryad; that he had told her to mind his paint; that she had told him not to drop his teeth overboard, and he had “sassed” her back; that the Dryad was a dandy ship, but would be a lot dandier if she were hove up on some beach convenient for pickin’ her.

Then she started to make the coffee over an auxiliary stove, mixing her industry with criticisms of the cookery and instructions as to how fish should be fried.

“Jude does the cookin’ mostly,” said Tyler, “and we’d have hot rolls only we were under sail last night and she hadn’t time to set the dough. We’ll have to make out with ship’s bread.”

Considering the condition of Jude’s grubby hands, Ratcliffe wasn’t sorry.