Satan. H. De Vere Stacpoole
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