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
the seven-fathom part of the Dogger--the part that looks like a man's
leg in the chart--and which was turned upside-down through the bank
breaking. The skipper and the mate got outside and clung to her
bottom, and a steam-cutter tried to get them off, but smashed them
both with her iron counter instead.

"Look!" said Weeks, gloomily pointing his finger. "I don't know why
that breaker didn't hit us. I don't know what we should have done if
it had. I can't think why it didn't hit us! Are you saved?"

Duncan was taken aback, and answered vaguely--"I hope so."

"But you must know," said Weeks, perplexed. The wind made a
theological discussion difficult. Weeks curved his hand into a
trumpet, and bawled into Duncan's ear: "You are either saved or not
saved! It's a thing one knows. You must know if you are saved, if
you've felt the glow and illumination of it." He suddenly broke off
into a shout of triumph: "But I got my fi