ngsgate 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!"

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