“There she is!” he cried.

“Yes, that’s the gun-boat,” answered Weeks.  “We can laugh at her with this wind.”

He put his smack about, and before the gun-boat puffed round the headland, three miles away, was reaching northwards with his sails free.  He rejoined the fleet that afternoon.  “Fifty-two boxes of soles!” said Weeks.  “And every one of them worth two-pound-ten in Billingsgate Market.  This smack’s mine!” and he stamped on the deck in all the pride of ownership.  “We’ll take a reef in,” he added.  “There’s a no’th-easterly gale blowin’ up and I don’t know anything worse in the No’th Sea.  The sea piles in upon you from Newfoundland, piles in till it strikes the banks.  Then it breaks.  You were right, Upton; we’ll be lying hove-to in the morning.”

They were lying hove-to before the morning.  Duncan, tossing about in his canvas cot, heard the skipper stamping overhead, and in an interval of the wind caught a snatch of song bawled out in a high voice.  The song was not reassuring, for the two lines which Duncan caught ran as follows—­

  You never can tell when your death-bells are ringing,
  Your never can know when you’re going to die.

Duncan tumbled on to the floor, fell about the cabin as he pulled on his sea-boots and climbed up the companion.  He clung to the mizzen-runners in a night of extraordinary blackness.  To port and to starboard the lights of the smacks rose on the crests and sank in the troughs, with such violence they had the air of being tossed up into the sky and then extinguished in the water; while all round him there flashed little points of white which suddenly lengthened out into a horizontal line.  There was one quite close to the quarter of the Willing Mind.  It stretched about the height of the gaff in a line of white.  The line suddenly descended towards him and became a sheet; and then a voice bawled, “Water!  Jump!  Down the companion!  Jump!”

There was a scamper of heavy boots, and a roar of water plunging over the bulwarks, as though so many loads of wood had been dropped on the deck.  Duncan jumped for the cabin.  Weeks and the mate jumped the next second and the water sluiced down after them, put out the fire, and washed them, choking and wrestling, about on the cabin floor.  Weeks was the first to disentangle himself, and he turned fiercely on Duncan.

“What were you doing on deck?  Upton and I keep the watch to-night.  You stay below, and, by God, I’ll see you do it!  I have fifty-two boxes of soles to put aboard the fish-cutter in the morning, and I’m not going to lose lives before I do that!  This smack’s mine!”