“We have her,” I cried, “if only all holds!”

“She will gather stern way directly,” said Bertric, with set teeth.  “Then she will fall off again, and the sheets will get adrift.”

We flew down on her, but we had been tricked so often before that we hardly dared to hope.  Now we were close to her bows, and we heard the great yard creaking and straining, and the dull flapping of the loose canvas of both tack and clew which had blown inboard.  The ship lurched and staggered under the uneasy strain, but the tackle held, and we had her.  Bertric went to our halliards and lowered the sail as I luffed alongside, and then Dalfin had gripped the rail between two of the shining shields.  There was no sea beyond a harmless ripple as yet, and we dropped aft to where a cleat was set for the boats on her quarter, and made fast.

Then as we looked at one another, there came to me as it were a breath from my lost home in far-off Caithness, for a whiff of peat smoke hung round us and was gone so quickly that I thought it almost fancy.  But Dalfin had smelt it also.

“There is a fire alight on board,” he said.  “I smelt the smoke.  That means food, and someone on board after all.”

With that he shouted, but there was no answer.  It would have been a relief to me if some ship’s dog had flown out and barked at us; but all was silent, and that was uncanny here in the open sea, and on such a ship.

“Well,” said Bertric, “crew or no, we must go on board.  No use in waiting.”

He swung himself up from the boat over the high gunwale, and then gave me a hand, and together we hauled up Dalfin, and so stood and stared at all we saw in wonder.

Everything was in perfect trim, and the ship was fitted as if for a long cruise.  She had two handsome boats, with carven gunwales and stem and stern posts set on their chocks side by side amidships, with their sails and oars in them.  Under the gunwales on either board were lashed the ship’s oars, and with them two carved gangway planks which seemed never to have been used.  Every line and rope’s end was coiled down snugly, and every trace of shore litter had been cleared from the white decks as if she had been a week at least at sea, though we knew, from her course, that she could not be more than a few hours out from the Norway coast.  We had guessed that she might have sailed at dawn.

But we wondered not so much at the trim of the ship, though that puzzled us; just aft of the mast, and set against its foot, was the pile we had taken for deck cargo, and the like of it I had never seen.  There had been built of heavy pine timbers, whose ends butted against either gunwale below, and rose to a ridge pole above, a pent house, as it were, which stood at the ridge some six feet high from the deck, and was about two fathoms long.  Its end was closed with timbers also, and against this end, and round, and partly over the roof, had been piled fagots of