The breeze had risen with the declining sun and the water round the Dryad looked like a spread of smashed sapphires.

They watched Skelton getting on board, and then they saw the dinghy lowered and the quarter-boat taking her in tow. In five minutes, like a white duckling behind a moor-hen, she was streaming on a line behind the Sarah and the quarter-boat was pulling back for the yacht.

Satan had got his wish, and Ratcliffe was feeling just as Skelton wanted him to feel, under a compliment and rather a beast. Then they saw the boat taken on board and the hands laying aloft and the canvas shaking out to the favoring breeze.

“He’ll have the wind right aft, and that’ll save his coal,” said Satan. “I reckon if his engines give out he wouldn’t bother much, with all that canvas to carry him.”

“They’re handlin’ it smart,” said Jude. “There’s the anchor goin’ up.”

The flurried sound of the steam winch raising the anchor came across the water, then it ceased, and Jude, running to the flag locker, fetched out a dingy old American flag, bent it on, and ran it up, dipping it as the Dryad began to move.

She returned the compliment, gliding away with the bow-wash beginning to show and the wake creaming behind her. As she passed the southern reefs and shifted her helm, squaring her yards to the following wind, a blast from her siren raised a blanket of shouting gulls. Then the island cut her off and the sea lay desolate.

The sense of his loneliness came on Ratcliffe, sudden as the clap of a door. He had cut the painter with civilization. The deck of the Sarah Tyler seemed smaller than ever, Jude and Satan more irresponsible and unaccountable, and his own daring a new thing, somewhat dubious. He had renounced services and delicacies and surety of passage and safety, letters and newspapers, everything he had known! The shock scarcely lasted a minute, and then, with the breeze across the pansy-blue evening sea, came blowing the wind of Adventure and Freedom.

Then in a moment some spirit explained to him what life really meant,—life as the Argonauts knew it, as the gulls know it, freedom in the intense and living moment, without a thought of yesterday, with scarcely a care for the morrow.

He took his seat in an old chair that Satan had placed under the rag of awning and lit his pipe. That delightful smoke seemed the culmination of everything in these first moments in this new world. As he smoked he watched the Tylers, who were so busy with their own affairs that they seemed to have forgotten him. They had hauled the dinghy alongside, then they got into her and were lost to sight; but he could hear their voices, Jude’s shrill with pleasure and excitement.

“My! Ain’t she a beauty? Ain’t she a dinky boat? My! look at the cushions!” A laugh. “For the love of Mike look at the cushions—cushions in a boat! Heave ’em on deck!” The cushions came flying over the rail, together with the voice of Satan, evidently bending.

“Leave them alone or I’ll bat y’ with the bailer! Well, let them lay on deck if they’re there. She’s a duck, new built too,—teak, copper fastenin’s, all the best that money could buy. Stop rockin’ her and over you get after the cushions.”

Jude came clambering on board, beaming in the sunset, then she got one of the boat’s cushions and took her seat on it on the deck beside Ratcliffe.

“I reckon old Popplecock’s as soft as his cushions, to be wangled out of a boat like that,” said Jude, examining the sole of her bare right foot for a fancied splinter. “Satan said he was goin’ to try it on him when you were down below with him. Didn’t believe he’d do it. That chap looked as stiff as his own mainmast—but there’s no tellin’—Say, I heard what you said to him when you were down below.”

“Oh, did you?”

“I wasn’t listenin’: I just heard through the skylight. I heard you sayin’ you liked us and the old Sarah better’n him and his boat—what makes likin’s?”

“I don’t know.” “Nuther do I; but we took to you right off, same as you to us. Ever done abalone fishin’?”

“No.”

“Well, I reckon you won’t want to do it again, once you’ve tried. There’ll be a big low tide tomorrow after sun-up, and you’ll have a chance of seein’ what it is. Finished your pipe? Well, come along and help us to get supper.”

For all the work Ratcliffe did, she might have got the supper herself. He was mostly in the way; but it was the companionship that helped. Brothers aren’t much good as companions. Ratcliffe was a new thing, absolutely new, from his striped pajamas and dandy clothes to his condition of mind, just as she was a new thing to Ratcliffe. Never did two beings come together so well or create more rapidly a little world of mutual interests out of the little things of life, or a weaker being dominate more completely the stronger.

“Can you make bread?” asked Jude after he had filled the tin kettle for her. “Well, you’ll have to learn. That’s the bakin’ powder in that big tin, and the flour’s in the starboard locker—What’re you doin’ with the tin? Land’s sake! You don’t think I’m goin’ to make bread for supper, same as you make tea? Where was you born?”

“Hampshire.”

“I thought it was somewhere like that,” said Jude.

She instructed him in the primitive method of bread making as conducted on board the Sarah Tyler, finishing up with the information that hardtack would be their portion at supper that night and breakfast next morning, as she was “up to the gunnel” in other business. Among the other things was having to put a patch on her trousers: not the ones she was wearing, which were her next best, but her worst. The old guernsey she was wearing was her second best. Coats! Oh, coats were good enough on Sunday or for going ashore in, but no use much in a ship, except an oilskin for dirty weather. Boots the same; stockings the same. You had to wear boots, of course, over rocks and through stuff like that over there on the island.

“Them pajamas” would be bully things to wear by day, only they’d frighten the fish. As for sleeping in such things, she’d just as soon seek the arms of Morpheus in a top hat. Why didn’t he wear a nighty like her and Satan? Pap’s eyes would have bugged out had he seen those things. He was “awful old fashioned,”—used to make her and Satan put cotton between their teeth every night. They did it still. She exhibited a set of dazzling white teeth to prove the fact. You just pulled a cotton thread between them, and then they never went rotten. Also he made them brush their teeth every morning. Folks that didn’t do that got toothache.

“Kettle’s boilin’,” suddenly finished Jude. “Now start in an’ let’s see you make the tea—said you could do it. There’s the can. Ain’t you goin’ to heat the pot first? How’re you to heat it? Let me have a hold. Now fling the water out. A spoonful a head and one for the pot and another one for Satan,—he likes it strong,—and if you’ll take it along to the cabin without spillin’ it I’ll be after you in a minute with the plates and things.”

Satan, who never put his hand to menial work, maintaining, without the least offense, his position as captain and owner, came down to supper, flushed with the good qualities of the dinghy. He had taken her for a row—and it was like hearing a man talking of a stroll with a sweetheart—if men ever talk of such things. Before going on deck to smoke he pointed out Ratcliffe’s quarters for the night. He was to have Pap’s cabin, the space divided off with a curtain. Jude and he always slept in hammocks swung in the “saloon.” Before going on deck he fetched an old canister out of a locker and, emptying some dried herbs into a saucer, set fire to them and left them smoldering on the table. It was to keep the mosquitoes away. Pap had got the receipt from a Seminole Indian up near Cedar Cays. It was patent stuff. Not a mosquito would come when there was a sniff of it in the air.

Then, just as the moon was rising, and after the things were washed up, they sat on deck, smoking, listening to the waves on the beach, and watching fish jumping in the track of the moon. They talked of fish, and to Ratcliffe’s mind two things became apparent,—Satan’s profound, awful knowledge of the sea and all that lived therein, and his absolute indifference to sport. Satan fished for food. Tarpon and tarpon fishermen filled him with disgust and disdain. You can’t eat tarpon, and the guys that came from New York and such places and spent their days fighting tarpon with a ten-ounce rod and a twenty-one-thread line seemed to him bereft of reason.

Jude, sitting on the deck and mending her pants by the light of the moon, concurred.

“But it’s the fun of the thing,” said Ratcliffe; “it’s the matching of one’s skill and strength against the fish.” He talked of the joys of salmon fishing.

“What bait do you use for them?” asked Satan.

“Flies.”

Jude shrieked.

“Not live flies,” he explained: “imitation ones.” He tried to describe artificial fly-making and finished with a sense of failure as of one who had entered the lists in defense of a niggling form of business that had yet a touch of humor in it.

Then, as they talked, suddenly through the night came a sound like the boom of a big gun. Ratcliffe nearly dropped his pipe.

“That’s a fish,” said Satan.

“Sea bat,” said Jude indifferently.

“That noise?”

“Sea bat jumping. There they go again. Must be a circus of them playin’ about beyond the reefs,—big flat fish, weigh all of a ton.”

“Tails as long as themselves and eyes like dinner plates,” said Jude, “mushy brutes. Tow a ship after them if they foul the anchor—won’t they, Satan?”

“They’re loudenin’,” said Satan. “They’ll be comin’ this way with the current. Come forward and have a look.” Leaning over the rail, they watched the moon-shot water. The sounds had ceased.

“They’ve stopped playin’,” said Satan, as though he knew exactly what they were doing.

“It’s too shallow for them here,” said Jude.

“Shallow! It’s fifty foot of water and a sandy bottom. What are you talkin’ about? Told you.”

The depths of the sea suddenly became lit. Down below vast forms came drifting like the mainsails of ships ablaze with phosphorescent light, drifting and turning over as they drifted like gargantuan leaves blown by the wind. The whiplike tails could be seen as streaks of flame. Glimpses of devilish faces and lambent eyes showed as they turned, the fins waving like frills of fire.

Then they were gone.

The Tylers showed little concern over the marvelous sight; allowing, however, that it was the biggest school of “bats” they had ever struck; but to Ratcliffe it was as though the sea had disclosed a peep of its true heart and real mystery.

Then they went to rest, and as he lay in Pap’s cabin, listening to the occasional trickle of the water against the planking and the groan of the rudder moved by the lilt of the swell, it seemed to him that daring in its everyday and cold-blooded form could not have carried a man much further than it had carried him. The sea bats had underscored the business as far as the mystery of the ocean and danger of cruising in such a small boat were concerned; the hardness of Pap’s bunk bedding told of comforts renounced; while the morals of the Tylers, though good enough no doubt, had, as disclosed in their conversation, a touch of the free lance and a threat of port authority troubles and differences of opinion with the customs. Absolute respect for the rights of man, partial respect for the rights of shipping companies and steamer lines, no respect at all for governments and customs,—that was an outline of the Tyler morality. What had made him renounce the Dryad for the Sarah? What, lying in his hard bunk, made him contented with the exchange? The love of adventure and the craving for something new contributed, no doubt, but the main reason he felt to be the Tylers,—Satan with his strange mentality and queer methods; Jude, unlike any other being he had ever met.

Then, as he lay considering all this, came muted voices from the “saloon.” Satan’s voice:

“Have you put the cotton between your teeth?”

Then Jude’s, drowsily:

“Naw—leave a body alone!”

“Get out o’ your hammock, you lazy dog, an’ fix your teeth or I’ll let you down by the head!”

Then Jude’s voice, dolorous and muffled, “Shut up or you’ll be wakin’ him! Cuss my teeth—cayn’t find the cotton! Wakin’ a body up like that! Tell you I’m lookin’ for it—got it—”

A long silence, during which Ratcliffe dropped off, to be awakened an hour later by the lamentations of Jude and the sounds of Satan prodding her out of a nightmare,—a gastric nightmare, in which it appeared to her troubled soul that she had to fry a sea bat, totum terres atque rotundum, in the small galley frying pan for breakfast.