any big job and I wouldn’t trust most men. They don’t grow trustable parties in Havana, nor the coast towns—not much. I’ve taken a likin’ to you somehow or ’nother, and if ever we come together again I’ll tell you maybe somethin’ that’s in my mind. You see, between Pap and me and the old Sarah, we’ve seen close on thirty years of these waters right from Caicos to N’y’Orleans and down to Trinidad. Turtle egg huntin’ and fishin’ and tradin’, there’s not a reef or cay we don’t know. The old Sarah could find her way round blind. Put her before the wind with the wheel half a spoke weather helm and leave her, and she’d sniff the reefs on her own.”
“You were saying about something more than fishing,” persisted Ratcliffe, whose curiosity had been, somehow, aroused.
“I was,” said Tyler; “but I’m not free to speak about private affairs without Jude, and there’s no use in tacklin’ her when she’s snorty. Listen to that!”
Sounds were coming from the galley as of a person banging pots and pans about.
Tyler chuckled.
“It’s always the same when her dander is up—she starts cleanin’ and dustin’ and makin’ hell of the place. Mother was the same. I reckon a woman can’t help bein’ a woman, not if she had a hundred pair of breeches on.”
“Well,” said Ratcliffe, “I’d like to come for a cruise, and I will some day, I hope. Maybe I’ll see you on the island later. I was intending going ashore today to have a look round: that’s why we anchored here.”
“Maybe I’ll see you ashore then,” said Tyler, “but if I’m not there, mind and say nothin’ of the cache.”
“Right!”
CHAPTER IV
PAP’S SUIT
Jude, having been fetched out of the galley, the canvas boat was got overboard.
Ratcliffe had offered to shed Pap’s suit and return in his pajamas as he had come, but Tyler vetoed the idea. The far-seeing Satan, who had snaffled a careen and clean up, not to speak of a main boom and spare canvas, out of Thelusson, had an object in view.
“It’s no trouble,” said he. “You take the dinghy, and we’ll take the boat and fetch the duds back. It’s late in the mornin’ for you to be boarding your ship in them colored things.”
One of the big fish caught that morning was dropped into the boat as a “present for the yacht,” and they started.
The accommodation ladder was down and Simmons and a quartermaster received Ratcliffe. As he went up the side he heard Tyler shouting to Simmons something about the fish. There was no sign of Skelton on deck, for which he was thankful, then he dived below to change.
Now “Pap’s” suit had been constructed for a man of over six feet and broad in proportion and a man, moreover, who liked his clothes loose and easy. On Ratcliffe they recalled the vesture of Dr. Jekyll on Mr. Hyde. The saloon door was closed. He opened it, and found himself face to face with Skelton, who was sitting at one end of the saloon table reading from a book, while Strangways the captain, Norton the first officer, Prosser the steward, and sundry others ranged according to their degree sat at attention.
It was Sunday morning. He had forgotten that fact, and there was no drawing back. He reached his cabin, mumbling apologies to the dead silence which seemed crystallized round Skelton, closed the door, and stuffed his head among the pillows of his bunk to stifle his laughter, then he undressed and dressed.
As he dressed he could hear through the open port the voice of Tyler from alongside. The voice was pitched in a conversational key; it was saying something about a lick of white paint. He was talking evidently to Simmons.
Then, fully dressed, with the bundle of clothes and the canvas shoes under his arm, Ratcliffe peeped into the saloon. The service was over and the saloon was empty. He reached the deck. It was deserted save for a few hands forward and Simmons.
Then he came down the accommodation ladder to the stage, and handed the clothes over to Satan.
A drum of white paint and a coil of spare rope were in the boat close to Jude, and Satan was saying to Simmons something about a spare ax.
“Well, if you haven’t got one, there’s no more to be said,” finished Satan; then to Ratcliffe, “See you ashore, maybe.”
Jude grinned kindly, and they pushed off, the boat a strake lower in the water with their loot.
The fat-faced Simmons watched them with the appearance of a man just released from mesmerism.
“That chap would talk the hat off one’s head,” said he. “I’ll have h—l to pay with Norton over that paint; most likely I’ll have to put my hand in my own pocket for it. But he’s a decent chap, that fellow, but sharp—the way he landed me with that fish for a bait!”
“He’s all there,” said Ratcliffe.
“So’s the boy,” said Simmons. “Come alongside after you’d gone, to say you were staying to breakfast with them. Told him to mind and not damage the paint. Let out like a bargee at me—and Sir William Skelton listening!”
“Where’s Sir William now, Simmons? He wasn’t in the saloon when I’d finished dressing.”
“I expect he’s in his cabin,” said Simmons.
Ratcliffe got a book and, taking his seat under the double awning sheltering the quarterdeck, tried to read. He had chosen a History of the West Indies, the same book most likely from which Skelton had “cadged” his information of the night before. The printed page was dull, however, compared to the spoken word, and he found himself wondering how it was that Skelly could have warmed him up so to all this stuff and yet be such an angular stick-in-the-mud in ordinary life. What made him such a superior person? What made him at thirty look forty, sometimes fifty, and what made him, Ratcliffe, fear Skelly sometimes, just as a schoolboy fears a master?
He guessed he was in for a wigging now for cutting breakfast and appearing like a guy before the officers, and he knew instinctively the form the wigging would take—a chilly manner and studious avoidance of the subject, that would be all—Christchurch on a wet Sunday for forty-eight hours, with the Oxford voice and the Oxford manner accentuated and thrown in.
At this moment Sir William Skelton, Bart., came on deck—a tall, thin man, clean shaved, like a serious-minded butler in a yachting suit of immaculate white drill. His breeding lay chiefly in his eyes: they were half-veiled by heavy lids. He had an open mother-of-pearl-handled penknife in his hand.
Free of the saloon hatch and not seeing Ratcliffe, he stopped dead like a pointer before game and called out “Quartermaster!”
A quartermaster came running aft.
Some raffle had been left on the scupper by the companionway, a fathom or so of old rope rejected by Tyler as not being the quality he was “wantin’.”
He ordered it to be taken forrard, then he saw Ratcliffe and nodded.
“
