CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
All day the wind shook the rusty reed-daggers at the sky, and the mace-heads were never still. Before sunset the couch was empty. The purple-ruddy beams stained the grass and the thistles of the meadow, and the tiles of the cattle-shippen under the sea-wall were the hue of the sky. Westward the marshman’s cottage, the linhays, the trees, the hedges, the low ragged line of the Burrows, were vanishing in a mist of fire.
The tide was ebbing, the mud slopes grey, with ruddy tricklings. In the salt turf below the sea-wall great cracks wandered with the fire of the sky. Ring-plover and little stints ran by the guts, and their slender peering images quenched the flame in the water. Bunches of oar-weed on each sodden perch dripped their last drops among the froth and spinning holes of the gliding tide. The mooring buoys rolled and returned, each keg gathering froth that the current sucked away under its lowest stave. By an old broken wicker crab-pot, only its rib-tops up, a small head showed without a ripple, moving with the water. Men were walking on the deck of a ketch below; other men were sitting at oars in a boat under the black hull waiting for their mates. A dog began to bark, then it whimpered, imtil it was pushed over the gunwale. It met the water in a reddish splash.
Men climbed down to the boat, oars were dipped, and the dog swam astern, breathing gruffly and whining. The otter head, drifting nearer, sank when a man pointed with his pipe-stem. Fifty yards below, by the chain sagging
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