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“I can’t put you ashore in Denmark,” said Weeks knowingly. “There’ll be seven weeks, it’s true, for things to blow over; but I’ll have to take you back to Yarmouth. And I can’t afford a passenger. If you come, you come as a hand. I mean to own my smack at the end of this voyage.”

Duncan climbed after him into the boat. The Willing Mind had now six for her crew, Weeks; his son Willie, a lad of sixteen; Upton, the first hand; Deakin, the decky; Rall, the baker’s assistant, and Alexander Duncan. And of these six four were almost competent. Deakin, it is true, was making his second voyage; but Willie Weeks, though young, had begun early; and Upton, a man of forty, knew the banks and currents of the North Sea as well as Weeks.

“It’s all right,” said the skipper, “if the weather holds.” And for a month the weather did hold, and the catches were good, and Duncan learned a great deal. He learnt how to keep a night-watch from midnight till eight in the morning, and then stay on deck till noon; how to put his tiller up and down when his tiller was a wheel, and how to vary the order according as his skipper stood to windward or to lee; he learnt to box a compass and to steer by it; to gauge the leeway he was making by the angle of his wake and the black line in the compass; above all, he learnt to love the boat like a live thing, as a man loves his horse, and to want every scanty inch of brass on her to shine.

But it was not for this that Duncan had come out to sea. He gazed out at night across the rippling starlit water, and the smacks nestling upon it, and asked of his God: “Is this all?” And his God answered him.

The beginning of it was the sudden looming of ships upon the horizon, very clear, till they looked like carved toys. The skipper got out his accounts and totted up his catches, and the prices they had fetched in Billingsgate Market. Then he went on deck and watched the sun set. There were no cloud-banks in the west, and he shook his head.

“It’ll blow a bit from the east before morning,” said he, and he tapped on the barometer. Then he returned to his accounts and added them up again. After a little he looked up, and saw the first hand watching him with comprehension.

“Two or three really good hauls would do the trick,” suggested Weeks.

The first hand nodded. “If it was my boat I should chance it to-morrow before the weather blows up.”

Weeks drummed his fists on the table and agreed.

On the morrow the Admiral headed north for the Great Fisher Bank, and the fleet followed, with the exception of the Willing Mind. The Willing Mind lagged along in the rear without her topsails till about half-past two in the afternoon, when Captain Weeks became suddenly alert. He bore away till he was right before the wind, hoisted every scrap of sail he could carry, rigged out a spinnaker with his balloon fore-sail, and made a clean run for the coast of Denmark. Deakin explained the manoeuvre to Duncan. “The old man’s goin’ poachin’. He’s after soles.”

“Keep a look-out, lads!” cried Weeks. “It’s not the Danish gun-boat I’m afraid of; it’s the fatherly English cruiser a-turning of us back.”

Darkness, however, found them unmolested. They crossed the three-mile limit at eight o’clock, and crept close in under the Danish headlands without a glimmer of light showing.

“I want all hands all night,” said Weeks; “and there’s a couple of pounds for him as first see the bogey-man.”

“Meaning the Danish gun-boat,” explained Deakin.

The trawl was down before nine. The skipper stood by his lead. Upton took the wheel, and all night they trawled in the shallows, bumping on the grounds, with a sharp eye for the Danish gun-boat. They hauled in at twelve and again at three and again at six, and they had just got their last catch on deck when Duncan saw by the first grey of the morning a dun-coloured trail of smoke hanging over a projecting knoll.