"Fifty-two boxes at two-pound-ten," said Weeks, as the boat was swung
inboard. "That's a hundred and four, and ten two's are twenty, and
carry two, and ten fives are fifty, and two carried, and twenties into
that makes twenty-six. One hundred and thirty pounds--this smack's
mine, every rope on her. I tell you what, Duncan: you've done me a
good turn to-day, and I'll do you another. I'll land you at Helsund,
in Denmark, and you can get clear away. All we can do now is to lie
out this gale."

Before the afternoon the air was dark with a swither of foam and spray
blown off the waves in the thickness of a fog. The heavy bows of
the smack beat into the seas with a thud and a hiss--the thud of a
steam-hammer, the hiss of molten iron plunged into water; the waves
raced exultingly up to the bows from windward, and roared angrily away
in a spume of foam from the ship's keel to lee; and the thrumming and
screaming of the storm in the rigging exceeded all that Duncan had
ever imagined. He clung to the stays appalled. This storm was surely
the perfect expression of anger, too persistent for mere fury. There
seemed to be a definite aim of destruction, a deliberate attempt to
wear the boat down, in the steady follow of wave upon wave, and in the
steady volume of the wind.

Captain Weeks, too, had lost all of a sudden all his exhilaration. He
stood moodily by Duncan's side, his mind evidently labouring like
his ship. He told Duncan stories which Duncan would rather not have
listened to, the story of the man who slipped as he stepped from the
deck into the punt, and weighted by his boots, had sunk down and down
and down through the clearest, calmest water without a struggle; the
story of the punt which got its painter under its keel and drowned
three men; the story of the full-rigged ship which got driven across