“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.
CHAPTER III
BREAKFAST
