“And brought the willing mind,” said Weeks with a smile, “Go, then!  Some one must go.  Get the boat tackle ready, forward.  Here, Willie, put your life-belt on.  You, too, Duncan, though God knows life-belts won’t be of no manner of use; but they’ll save your insurance.  Steady with the punt there!  If it slips inboard off the rail there will be a broken back!  And, Willie, don’t get under the cutter’s counter.  She’ll come atop of you and smash you like an egg.  I’ll drop you as close as I can to windward, and pick you up as close as I can to leeward.”

The boat was dropped into the water and loaded up with fish-boxes.  Duncan and Willie Weeks took their places, and the boat slid away into a furrow.  Duncan sat in the boat and rowed.  Willie Weeks stood in the stern, facing him, and rowed and steered.

“Water!” said Willie every now and then, and a wave curled over the bows and hit Duncan a stunning blow on the back.

“Row,” said Willie, and Duncan rowed and rowed.  His hands were ice, he sat in water ice-cold, and his body perspired beneath his oil-skins, but he rowed.  Once, on the crest of a wave, Duncan looked out and saw below them the deck of a smack, and the crew looking upwards at them as though they were a horserace.  “Row!” said Willie Weeks.  Once, too, at the bottom of a slope down which they had bumped dizzily, Duncan again looked out, and saw the spar of a mainmast tossing just over the edge of a grey roller.  “Row,” said Weeks, and a moment later, “Ship your oar!” and a rope caught him across the chest.

They were alongside the cutter.

Duncan made fast the rope.

“Push her off!” suddenly cried Willie, and grasped an oar.  But he was too late.  The cutter’s bulwarks swung down towards him, disappeared under water, caught the punt fairly beneath the keel and scooped it clean on to the deck, cargo and crew.

“And this is only the first trip!” said Willie.

The two following trips, however, were made without accident.

“Fifty-two boxes at two-pound-ten,” said Weeks, as the boat was swung inboard.  “That’s a hundred and four, and ten two’s are twenty, and carry two, and ten fives are fifty, and two carried, and twenties into that makes twenty-six.  One hundred and thirty pounds—­this smack’s mine, every rope on her.  I tell you what, Duncan:  you’ve done me a good turn to-day, and I’ll do you another.  I’ll land you at Helsund, in Denmark, and you can get clear away.  All we can do now is to lie out this gale.”

Before the afternoon the air was dark with a swither of foam and spray blown off the waves in the thickness of a fog.  The heavy bows of the smack beat into the seas with a thud and a hiss—­the thud of a steam-hammer, the hiss of molten iron plunged into water; the waves raced exultingly up to the bows from windward, and roared angrily away in a spume of foam from the ship’s keel to lee; and the thrumming and screaming of the storm in the rigging exceeded all that Duncan had ever imagined.  He clung to the stays appalled.  This storm was surely the perfect expression of anger, too persistent for mere fury.  There seemed to be a definite aim of destruction, a deliberate attempt to wear the boat down, in the steady follow of wave upon wave, and in the steady volume of the wind.