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After dinner Duncan said: “I’ll put her about now.”

“No; wear her and let her jibe,” said Weeks, “then you’ll on’y have to ease your sheets.”

Duncan stood at the wheel, while Weeks, with the compass swinging above his head, shouted directions through the companion. They sailed the boat all that night with the wind on her quarter, and at daybreak Duncan brought her to and heaved his lead again. There was rough sand with blackish specks upon the tallow, and Weeks, when he saw it, forgot his broken leg.

“My word,” he cried, “we’ve hit the Fisher Bank! You’d best lash the wheel, get our breakfast, and take a spell of sleep on deck. Tie a string to your finger and pass it down to me, so that I can wake you up.”

Weeks waked him up at ten o’clock, and they ran southwest with a steady wind till six, when Weeks shouted–

“Take another cast with your lead.”

The sand upon the tallow was white like salt.

“Yes,” said Weeks; “I thought we was hereabouts. We’re on the edge of the Dogger, and we’ll be in Yarmouth by the morning.” And all through the night the orders came thick and fast from the cabin. Weeks was on his own ground; he had no longer any need of the lead; he seemed no longer to need his eyes; he felt his way across the currents from the Dogger to the English coast; and at daybreak he shouted–

“Can you see land?”

“There’s a mist.”

“Lie to, then, till the sun’s up.”

Duncan lay the boat to for a couple of hours, till the mist was tinged with gold and the ball of the sun showed red on his starboard quarter. The mist sank, the brown sails of a smack thrust upwards through it; coastwards it shifted and thinned and thickened, as though cunningly to excite expectation as to what it hid. Again Weeks called out–

“See anything?”

“Yes,” said Duncan, in a perplexed voice. “I see something. Looks like a sort of mediaeval castle on a rock.”

A shout of laughter answered him.

“That’s the Gorleston Hotel. The harbour-mouth’s just beneath. We’ve hit it fine,” and while he spoke the mist swept clear, and the long, treeless esplanade of Yarmouth lay there a couple of miles from Duncan’s eyes, glistening and gilded in the sun like a row of dolls’ houses.

“Haul in your sheets a bit,” said Weeks. “Keep no’th of the hotel, for the tide’ll set you up and we’ll sail her in without dawdlin’ behind a tug. Get your mainsail down as best you can before you make the entrance.”

Half an hour afterwards the smack sailed between the pier-heads.

“Who are you?” cried the harbour-master.

“The Willing Mind.”

“The Willing Mind’s reported lost with all hands.”

“Well, here’s the Willing Mind,” said Duncan, “and here’s one of the hands.”

The irrepressible voice bawled up the companion to complete the sentence–

“And the owner’s reposin’ in his cabin.” But in a lower key he added words for his own ears. “There’s the old woman to meet. Lord! but the Willing Mind has cost me dear.”