A fisherman lounging against a winch replied to them—–­

“If Weeks is a friend o’ yours I should get used to missin’ ’im, as I tell his wife.”

There was at that time an ingenious system by which the skipper might buy his smack from the owner on the instalment plan—­as people buy their furniture—­only with a difference:  for people sometimes get their furniture.  The instalments had to be completed within a certain period.  The skipper could do it—­he could just do it; but he couldn’t do it without running up one little bill here for stores, and another little bill there for sail-mending.  The owner worked in with the sail-maker, and just as the skipper was putting out to earn his last instalment, he would find the bailiffs on board, his cruise would be delayed, he would be, consequently, behindhand with his instalment and back would go the smack to the owner with a present of four-fifths of its price.  Weeks had to pay two hundred pounds, and had eight weeks to earn it in.  But he got the straight tip that his sail-maker would stop him; and getting together any sort of crew he could, he slipped out at night with half his stores.

“Now the No’th Sea,” concluded the fisherman, “in November and December ain’t a bobby’s job.”

Duncan walked forward to the pier-head.  He looked out at a grey tumbled sky shutting down on a grey tumbled sea.  There were flecks of white cloud in the sky, flecks of white breakers on the sea, and it was all most dreary.  He stood at the end of the jetty, and his great possibility came out of the grey to him.  Weeks was shorthanded.  Cribbed within a few feet of the smack’s deck, there would be no chance for any man to shirk.  Duncan acted on the impulse.  He bought a fisherman’s outfit at Gorleston, travelled up to London, got a passage the next morning on a Billingsgate fish-carrier, and that night went throbbing down the great water street of the Swim, past the green globes of the Mouse.  The four flashes of the Outer Gabbard winked him good-bye away on the starboard, and at eleven o’clock the next night far out in the North Sea he saw the little city of lights swinging on the Dogger.

The Willing Mind’s boat came aboard the next morning and Captain Weeks with it, who smiled grimly while Duncan explained how he had learnt that the smack was shorthanded.

“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.