The sun was nearly touching the horizon when he dropped into his boat and rowed off.

“Look here!” said Ratcliffe. “Are you in earnest with that chap?”

“I sure am,” said Satan.

“Going to take him down to Lone Reef?”

“Yep.”

“But how about Carquinez? We had got to wait for him here till he gets back from Havana with the dynamite.”

“Yes,” said Satan, “we’d got to wait here one week, or maybe ten days allowin’ for weather—where was you born?”

“How?”

“Cark’s tried to sell me a pup, that’s how! He’s gone to no Havana: he’s crackin’ on for the wreck with every stitch he can carry. Reckons to bust her open and scoop the boodle while we’re layin’ here rubbin’ our noses and waitin’ for him. Mind you,” said Satan, “I may be wrong, but that’s my ’pinion.”

“But he sailed off toward Havana.”

“Lord! Hasn’t he a rudder?” “All the same, would it pay him?”

“How?”

“Well, if he played a dirty trick on you like that, wouldn’t he be afraid you’d split?”

“Who to?”

“To the authorities at Cuba.”

“D’you remember Sellers talkin’ about landin’ the stuff,” asked Satan, “sayin’ they’d have to take it round to Santiago way? They thought I was drinkin’ all that in. If there were any dollars in the business, d’you think they’d touch Cuba? Not they! They’d either cache the stuff or run it to some likely port. I was laughin’ in my hat all the time. Now you may think me a suspicious cuss. I’m not; but a feller has to run by compass in this world or go off his course, and my compass in this turnout is Cark. I say he’s gone down to Lone Reef and given me the left leg over the business, and my compass is the fac’ that he can’t run straight. Not if he tried to, he couldn’t run straight; nor could Sellers nor Cleary. If them fellers were straight, I’d match them and give them a fair deal. As it is, they’re like a lot of blind bally-hoolies playin’ blindman’s buff, runnin’ round and round, with me in the middle, tryin’ to kidoodle me and bein’ kidoodled themselves. Forty dollars for them rotten pearls, and all sorts of fixin’s out of Sellers—and I haven’t done with them yet!”

It had seemed to Ratcliffe, on board the Juan, that Carquinez was the spider of the web of this business. It seemed to him now that the spider was Satan.

He began to wonder was there any wreck at all, was the treasure story a myth. The idea of these rogues being incited to dreams of fortune so that they might be plundered of pots of paint and cans of turpentine and a few dollars appealed to him immensely. He remembered Thelusson and Skelton, he remembered Jude’s yarn about fruit steamers being held up, he remembered Carquinez and Sellers, and he had just seen Cleary; and of a sudden Satan’s ocean-wide activities appeared before him in nightmare contrast with their microscopic results. Great steamers stopped for a bunch of bananas, yachts lying idle to careen the Sarah, ships sailing from Havana to hunt for buried treasure—but in reality to supply the wandering Sarah with cans of turpentine and a few dollars! Was there any treasure, or was the whole thing a Tyler fake invented by Pap and handed to his family as an heirloom? He could not resist the question.

“That chart you showed us,” said he,—“is there anything really in it?”

Satan took him at once.

“The chart’s all right,” said he, “for them that can read it. If you mean is it genuine, I reckon it is—for them that can read it. We’ll see some day if I’m right or wrong; but, honest truth, I’m not botherin’ much about it,—the chances are so big, as I told you before, against treasure huntin’, and even if we strike it what’s the use of barrels of gold to a feller like me? If you ask me, I’m botherin’ more about the kid than huntin’ for money.”

“You mean?”

“Jude. Suppose I was to get a bash on the head from one of them cusses, or drop to the smallpox, same as I pretended to Sellers, what’d become of the kid?”

The sound of the “kid” frying fish for supper came mixed with the question.

“I know,” said Ratcliffe, “that’s a problem that must often occur to you, I should think.”

“You’ve seen the sort of crowd Havana’s made of,” went on Satan. “It’s hard to tell which is worse, the Yanks or the Spaniards, and there’s not a seaport that’s not the same, and when I think of me lyin’ dead and her driftin’ loose, it gets my goat. It’d be different if she was a boy.”

“Besides that,” said the other, “she can’t go on always as she is now.”

“How’d you mean?”

“Well, dressed as she is now. She’ll grow up.”

“Sure,” said Satan.

“She’ll have to dress differently some day.”

“Meanin’ skirts?”

“Yes.”

Satan laughed a hollow laugh. The idea seemed so futile that he did not dwell upon it, or seemed not to.

“Have you any female relations yourself?” asked he.

“Lots,” replied Ratcliffe, calling up in memory his cousins and aunts, females of the highest upper-middle-class respectability, and vaguely wondering what they would think of Jude could they see her.

“The bother is,” said Satan, “she don’t take to women folk; always was against them, and that Thelusson woman put the cap on the business, kissin’ her and handin’ out slop talk. Well, I don’t know. I reckon she’ll have to go on bein’ what she is till somethin’ happens; but it would have been a lot handier if she’d been born a boy.”

He turned and went below.

The sun had sunk beyond Palm Island, and a violet dusk, forerunner of the dark, was spreading through the sky. Over beyond the Natchez the sea for a moment became hard looking as a floor of beryl, then vague.

Ratcliffe, lingering for a moment watching this transformation scene, found himself thinking of Jude and her problem. The Tylers had taken an extraordinarily firm hold upon him. He knew them more intimately than he knew his own relations, or fancied so. It seemed to him that he had known them for years.

When this cruise was over and he packed up his traps and left them, he would probably never see them again. Jude and Satan would go their way and he would go his way—and what would happen to Jude? Suppose Satan were to die, get knocked on the head or “fall to the smallpox”? The thought hurt him almost as much as it hurt Satan; for Jude had, somehow or another, captured his mind and touched his heart, and her youth and absolute irresponsibility before the major facts of life had infected him in the most extraordinary manner.

Over there on the island, engaged in the serious matter of provisioning the Sarah, they had been carrying on like children. He had not thought of it then; now, reflecting sanely, it rose before him together with the rest of this strange cruise, and for a moment the whole business seemed mad, absolutely mad. The supersane figure of Skelton rose up before him, and beyond Skelton, Oxford, the calm, sane English country, where the Tylers would have been impossible, the hard bourgeois conventions of the upper-upper-middle classes, those uncles, cousins, and aunts to whom Class was as holy as Sunday and to whom Jude would be absolutely invisible as she was.

He was engaged in these reflections when a voice broke the stillness of the evening, a half-tired, half-cantankerous voice, the voice of an overworked housekeeper who had been frying fish while others have been idling.

“Ain’t you comin’ to help me?” inquired the voice.