Captain Weeks was transformed into a savage animal fighting for his own.  All night he and the mate stood on the deck and plunged down the open companion with a torrent of water to hurry them.  All night Duncan lay in his bunk listening to the bellowing of the wind, the great thuds of solid green wave on the deck, the horrid rush and roaring of the seas as they broke loose to leeward from under the smack’s keel.  And he listened to something more—­the whimpering of the baker’s assistant in the next bunk.  “Three inches of deck!  What’s the use of it!  Lord ha’ mercy on me, what’s the use of it?  No more than an eggshell!  We’ll be broken in afore morning, broken in like a man’s skull under a bludgeon....  I’m no sailor, I’m not; I’m a baker.  It isn’t right I should die at sea!”

Duncan stopped his ears, and thought of the journey some one would have to make to the fish-cutter in the morning.  There were fifty-two boxes of soles to be put aboard.

He remembered the waves and the swirl of foam upon their crests and the wind.  Two men would be needed to row the boat, and the boat must make three trips.  The skipper and the first hand had been on deck all night.  There remained four, or rather three, for the baker’s assistant had ceased to count—­Willie Weeks, Deakin, and himself, not a great number to choose from.  He felt that he was within an ace of a panic, and not so far, after all, from that whimperer his neighbour.  Two men to row the boat—­two men!  His hands clutched at the iron bar of his hammock; he closed his eyes tight; but the words were thundered out at him overhead, in the whistle of the wind, and slashed at him by the water against the planks at his side.  He found that his lips were framing excuses.

Duncan was on deck when the morning broke.  It broke extraordinarily slowly, a niggardly filtering of grey, sad light from the under edge of the sea.  The bare topmasts of the smacks showed one after the other.  Duncan watched each boat as it came into view with a keen suspense.  This was a ketch, and that, and that other, for there was the peak of its reefed mainsail just visible, like a bird’s wing, and at last he saw it—­the fish-cutter—­lurching and rolling in the very middle of the fleet, whither she had crept up in the night.  He stared at it; his belly was pinched with fear as a starveling’s with hunger; and yet he was conscious that, in a way, he would have been disappointed if it had not been there.

“No other smack is shipping its fish,” quavered a voice at his elbow.  It was the voice of the baker’s assistant.

“But this smack is,” replied Weeks, and he set his mouth hard.  “And, what’s more, my Willie is taking it aboard.  Now, who’ll go with Willie?”

“I will.”

Weeks swung round on Duncan and stared at him.  Then he stared out to sea.  Then he stared again at Duncan.

“You?”

“When I shipped as a hand on the Willing Mind, I took all a hand’s risks.”