“But it seems that you have ships, if you fought the Danes on the water?”

“Never a ship!  We fell on them in the fishers’ coraghs—­the skin boats.”

“And beat them?”

“Well, it was not to be expected; but we made them afraid.”

Dalfin stood up in the boat unsteadily, and swung his arms to warm himself.  She was a wide and roomy fishing craft, and weatherly enough, if she did make more leeway than one would wish in a breeze.

“There is less wind,” he said.  “It is not so cold.”

The long, smooth sea was going down also, or he would not have kept his footing as he did.  I looked up sharply, and met the Saxon’s eye.  A calm to come was the last thing we wished.

“Maybe there is a shift of wind coming,” Bertric said.  “No reason why we may not make the most of what breeze is left now.”

“It is the merest chance if any man spies us by this time,” I said.  “We will risk it.”

So we stepped the mast and set sail, heading eastward at once.  We trimmed the boat by putting Dalfin in the bows, while I steered, and the Saxon sat on the floor aft and tended sheet.  I asked him to steer, but he said the boat was my own, and that I was likely to get more out of her than a stranger.  The sail filled, and the boat heeled to the steady breeze; and it was good to hear the ripples wake at the bows, and feel the life come back to her, as it were, after the idle drifting of the last hour.  But there was no doubt that the wind was failing us little by little.

About sunrise it breezed up again, and cheered us mightily.  That lasted for half an hour, and then the sail flapped against the mast, and the calm we feared fell.  The long swell sank little by little until we floated on a dead smooth sea, under brightest sunshine, with the seabirds calling round us.  Nor was there the long line of the Orkney hills to be seen, however dimly, away to the eastward as we had hoped.

“How will the tide serve us hereabout?” asked Bertric presently.

“The flood will set in to the eastward in two hours’ time,” I answered.  “It depends on how we lie on the Orkney coasts whether it drifts us to the northward or to the southward.  We have been set to the westward all night with the ebb.”

“Wind may come with the flood,” said he.

And that was the best we could hope for.  But I set the steering oar in the sculling rowlock aft, and did what I could in that way.  At least, it saved some of the westward drift, if it was of very little use else.

Dalfin curled up in the sun and slept.  He had no care for the possible troubles which were before us, knowing naught of the sea; but this calm made the Saxon and myself anxious enough.

“After all,” I said, “maybe it will only be a matter of hunger for a day or two.”

Bertric smiled, and pointed to the locker under the stern thwart, on which I was sitting.