As he sculled up alongside the Sarah there was no sign of Jude. He tied up the boat and came over the rail.

“Jude, where are you?”

“What you want?” came a surly voice from below. She was in the “saloon,” for he could hear her moving about.

“You.”

“Well, you kin go on wantin’. I’m sick!”

“What on earth’s the matter with you?”

Pause—then the voice came again mixed with sounds as of plates being put away.

“I’m sick of the hull of this crowd—washing up and cooking and you two playin’ about!”

“Come up on deck.”

“Sha’n’t! I’m going to scatter—soon’s I’ve finished clearing away. Life of a dog!” indistinct grumbles tailing away into silence.

He lit a pipe and waited.

Presently the companionway creaked and a head appeared at the cabin hatch. He said nothing while the whole body emerged, stood erect on the deck, and shaded its eyes toward the Juan. Then, still speechless, it leaned on the rail, looking toward the reef and apparently lost in thought.

The sleeves of the guernsey were rolled up to mid-arm, ill temper seemed to have vanished and to have been replaced by sudden laziness, and as she lolled, kicking up a bare heel, she whistled.

She seemed utterly unconscious of his presence—or pretending to be. Then her eyes fell to the water alongside and the dinghy. The whistling ceased and her face turned to him.

“Say,” said Jude, “where did you learn to tie up boats?”

He came beside her.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing at present, but give her half an hour and she’d work herself free of that tom-fool knot.”

“I’ll go down and retie it.”

“No use in troubling, I’m going off in her in a minute, and she’ll hang there till I’m ready.”

“Where are you going?”

“Never you mind! You’ve been playing about on the reef, and you’ve got to stick here now and boil the potatoes! Me alone here all the morning!”

“Why, I wasn’t more than an hour on the reef—and I never knew you wanted to go. If I had, I shouldn’t have gone, honestly I shouldn’t.”

Jude contemplated him a moment with a more friendly face.

“Well,” said she, “I’m going, anyhow.” “But where to?”

“Gulls-nesting.”

“On the reef?”

“Lord, no! To the spit away there to east’ard. You can’t see it: it’s near seven mile away.”

“But you can’t row there alone.”

“Can’t I? You bet I can, there and back by sundown!”

“But what will Satan say?”

Jude laughed. “He’ll be wild—that’s what I want to make him. I’ll learn him! Him and his jumpers!”

She took the jumper off the rail, rolled it up and threw it on the deck, then she dived below and reappeared with a water jar and some provisions done up in a bundle. She had evidently been making her preparations.

“Look here!” said Ratcliffe. “If you’re going, I’ll go too.”

“No, you won’t!” said Jude. “You’ve got to stick here and look after the ship—and see how you like it.”

“Not I—I couldn’t face Satan; besides, if you want to make him wild really, hell be twice as wild if we both go; besides, I’m sick of the ship. Come on: I’ve never been gulls-nesting.”

Jude, evidently weakening, put down her bundle.

“Well, there ain’t enough grub for two,” she complained. “I reckon there’s enough water, though.”

“Well, get some more grub.”

She cast her eyes about in indecision, now at Ratcliffe, now at the Juan, then, with one of those sudden changes so indicative of her, she made up her mind and dived below.

Five minutes later she reappeared with another small bundle.

Ratcliffe, during her absence, had torn the back off an old letter. He had a pencil in his pocket, and, scrawling “gone gulls-nesting on the sandspit” on the paper, stuck the missive to the mast with his penknife.

Then, bundling the food and the water jar into the dinghy, they started.

He took the sculls at first, Jude steering, her eyes fixed ahead under the shade of her old panama. She could tell exactly the spot where the spit lay. She could not see it, but she could see in the sky now and then over there a faint trace like a haze of smoke that formed, vanished and reformed,—gulls.

Occasionally she looked back where the deserted Sarah Tyler lay, with the Juan seeming now close beside her and the reef behind them. Smaller and smaller they grew and more vast the ocean, an infinity of blazing lazulite, without horizon, silent, but sonorous with light.

The current was with them.

Satan had made a small mast and lug sail for the dinghy. That was the job he had been engaged on while Jude and Ratcliffe had landed on Palm Island to get provisions from the cache. He had worked with all the care of a fond mother making a garment for a beloved child. The little mast, scraped and varnished, the sail made of an extra special bit of stuff wheedled from Thelusson, were in the boat, and, a breeze now springing up from the sou’west, Jude gave orders to step the mast. Then she took the sheet, he slipped from his seat to the bottom of the boat, and the dinghy, bending to the three-knot breeze, lifted to the gentle swell.

A great herring hog passed them, plunging like a dolphin, and a flying fish with blind, staring eyes missed the sail by a hand’s breadth and flickered into the sea ahead; then a strange-looking gull swooped toward them from nowhere, hung for a moment with domed wings, honey-colored against the sun, and passed with a cry into the great silence, a silence broken only by the slap and tinkle of the water against the planking.

Ratcliffe lit his pipe. Jude, steering, seemed to have forgotten her last trace of grudge against him, forgotten Satan and the jumper and the fact that she had been left to her lonesome while they had been playing on the reef and her desire to cut the whole show and start a “la’ndry.” She seemed just now a different person, companionable and friendly and sane, as though the cooking and cleaning and the worries and troubles of the Sarah had been lifted like a dish-cover from her prisoned soul.

It was the first time they had been really alone together, and the companionship that springs from loneliness helped.

The gull reminded her of gulls she had seen on the Louisiana coast where the cypress swamps come down to meet the sea and you could hear “the bullfrogs shoutin’ all night, ‘Paddy got drunk, Paddy got drunk, Paddy got drunk,’ and the other chaps answering up, ‘Bottle of rum, bottle of rum, bottle of rum,’ and the ’gaters would come alongside grinding against the planking sniffing for bits—ever seen a ’gater?”

“Only stuffed.”

“Which way?”

“Oh, in museums and places.”

“What’s them?” asked Jude.

“Oh, places where they keep stuffed birds and animals.”

“Git a bit more to sta’board to trim the boat; sta’board I said, not port! And what in the nation do they want keeping them things for?”

“Jude,” said he lazily.

“What?”

“This is the jolliest time I ever spent. I’ve never felt free before till just now. I’d like to go sailing round and round the world in this little dinghy and forget civilization. That’s the place where they keep stuffed birds to look at, and stuffed animals in museums, and where the men and women are stuffed idiots. Do you remember the morning I came on board the Sarah first?”

“Them pajamas!”

“Yes, them pajamas. Only for them you wouldn’t have laughed at me, and if you hadn’t laughed at me I shouldn’t have come aboard, perhaps.”

“Oh, yes, you would.”

“Why?”

“Satan wanted you.”

“Oh, did he? Bless Satan!—he made me young again.”

“Lord! you ain’t so old as all that.” “I’m over twenty-one—and you’re only—”

“Raisin’ sixteen,” said Jude, with steady eyes fixed ahead where the gulls above the spit were now well visible.

He refilled and lit his pipe, bending under the gunnel.

“You’re mighty fond of that old pipe,” said Jude.

“Have a whiff?”

“Not me! I had half a cigar once; Dirk Peterson dared me. It was one of them wheelings, black, slick-lookin’ cigars. He and me an’ anuther boy’d gone to look at the nigger girls bathin’ and clod them—”

“Where on earth was that?”

“Vera Cruz.”

“Oh, and who was Dirk Peterson?”

“Son of an old feller that run a dridger in the harbor, Yankee, half-Dutch, hadn’t only one eye, and wasn’t more’n eleven, biggest liar from here to C’necticut. His face was all chawed up, and he said he’d got it like that and lost his eye fightin’ with a tiger. Confl’ent smallpox was what had done him, so Pap said; but the boys believed him till that day I was telling you of, he fetched out a half cigar he’d stole or picked up somewhere and a box of waxios and dared me smoke her—and I lit her up, like a durned fool!”

“What happened then?”

“Oh, lots of things,” said Jude. “First of all the harbor begun spinnin’, and then it went on till two tides more I’d have been inside out, when Dirk shouts to some chaps to come an’ look at Jonah tryin’ to bring up the whale. That got my goat, and I laid for him by the foot and brought him down and near beat the head off him. Then I got sick on him again, and he run home to his mother, with all the fellers after him wantin’ to know about that tiger.”

“He couldn’t fight?”

“N’more than a jewfish.”

“Have you had many fights with boys?”

“Not me—not with Satan handy to do the fighting. I’d only to say to one, ‘You touch me and I’ll put Satan on you,’ and he’d shrivel.”

“Well, I shouldn’t care to tackle Satan myself,” admitted Ratcliffe. “And Sellers seemed to think a lot of him that way, for I heard him asking if he’d stand by if Cleary showed fight.”

“Garn!” said Jude. “Cleary—he’s no good; Sellers is no good, neither. There’s not a man in these seas nowadays that’s got the fight of a tomcat in him. That’s what Pap used to say. He was great on old times, and used to string off yarns about the pirates and the high doin’s there used to be, and he said we were nothing but a lot of scowbankers now—and that’s the truth! If Cleary comes up with Cark, they’ll be shaking hands and kissing one another, feeling in each other’s pockets all the time to see if they can’t steal five cents. In the old days they’d have been cutting each other’s throats.”

“Would you like to be a pirate, Jude?”

“You bet!”

“Murdering people?”

“Oh, ask me another.”

“How’d you like to kiss Cark?” “How’d you? Hear the gulls!”

The crying of the gulls above the spit was coming up against the wind, a lamentable sound across the lone blue sea.

“We’re not more’n a mile away,” said the steersman. “You can get a sight of the spit if you raise yourself. That’s it, the white line runnin’ north and south; but the gulls don’t seem to be as many as they used to be a year ago. It’s a bit early for the full laying season, but there’s sure to be turkles’ eggs. Better get your shoes and stockin’s off and roll up your pants, for it’s shallow beaching and we’ll have to run her up.”

“Won’t you take down the sail and row her in?”

“Not me. There’s no sea on and I’ll run her up as she is.”

They held on, the gulls shouting over them now, and the sigh of the sandspit, fuming to the lazy sea, in their ears. It was full tide, and as the keel touched the sand, letting the sheet go and the sail to flog in the wind, they tumbled over and dragged the little boat high and dry.

Then Jude took down the sail.

“You aren’t hungry yet?” said Jude.

“No; are you?”

“Well, I can wait. Well leave the grub and the water jar in the boat and cover them with the sail,—keep the sun off. Lend’s a hand.”

They covered the provisions, hauled the boat up another foot or two to make sure, and, that done, Ratcliffe looked around him.