here are
plenty of ducks, but I made out that it's not easy for strangers to
get shooting. The whole country's so very civilized; it's not _wild_
enough, is it?'

He looked at me. I had no very clear opinion. It was anything but
wild in one sense, but there seemed to be wild enough spots for
ducks. The shore we were passing appeared to be bordered by lonely
marshes, though a spacious champaign showed behind. If it were not
for the beautiful places we had seen, and my growing taste for our
way of seeing them, his disappointing vagueness would have nettled me
more than it did. For, after all, he had brought me out loaded with
sporting equipment under a promise of shooting.

'Bad weather is what we want for ducks,' he said; 'but I'm afraid
we're in the wrong place for them. Now, if it was the North Sea,
among those Frisian islands--' His tone was timid and interrogative,
and I felt at once that he was sounding me as to some unpalatable
plan whose nature began to dawn on me.

He stammered on through a sentence or two about 'wildness' and
'nobody to interfere with you,' and then I broke in: 'You surely
don't want to leave the Baltic?'

'Why not?' said he, staring into the compass.

'Hang it, man!' I returned, tartly, 'here we are in October, the
summer over, and the weather gone to pieces. We're alone in a
cockle-shell boat, at a time when every other yacht of our size is
laying up for the winter. Luckily, we seem to have struck an ideal
cruising-ground, with a wide choice of safe fiords and a good
prospect of ducks, if we choose to take a little trouble about them.
You can't mean to waste time and run risks' (I thought of the torn
leaf in the log-book) 'in a long voyage to those forbidding haunts of
yours in the North Sea.'

'It's not very long,' said Davies, doggedly. 'Part of it's canal, and
the rest is quite safe if you're careful. There's plenty of sheltered
water, and it's not really necessary--'

'What's it all for?' I interrupted, impatiently. 'We haven't _tried_
for shooting here yet. You've no notion, have you, of getting the
boat back to England this autumn?'

'England?' he muttered. 'Oh, I don't much care.' Again his vagueness
jarred on me; there seemed to be some bar between us, invisible and
insurmountable. And, after all, what was I doing here? Roughing it in
a shabby little yacht, utterly out of my element, with a man who, a
week ago, was nothing to me, and who now was a tiresome enigma. Like
swif