Peter Duck. Arthur Ransome

with her mouth open and her sentence unfinished, saw Peter Duck bend quietly and unfasten the chain from the samson-post. She saw him pick up a mallet. And still the parrot chattered and flapped its wings.

      She saw Peter Duck swing the mallet and strike the belaying-pin out of the link. Four fathom of chain flew with a roar through the hawse-hole. There was a crash of breaking wood and a tremendous splash, as the anchor, with Black Jake upon it, dropped, smashed the dinghy and plunged to the bottom of the harbour.

      Everybody rushed to the side and looked down. Bits of broken dinghy showed in the dusk. And then a dark head came to the surface.

      “Black Jake again!” cried Titty.

      “Who else?” said Peter Duck.

      They watched him swim across to the Viper. They saw the dark figure, dim in the dusk, swarm up the warp over the Viper’s stern.

      “Gosh!” said Nancy.

      Captain Flint spoke as quietly and calmly as if someone had dropped a teaspoon. “What happened, Mr. Duck?” he said.

      “Anchor went with a run, sir,” said Peter Duck. “It just seemed to me it could do with a bit of washing. So I knocked the pin out and let it go. Black Jake was on it.”

      “On it?” said Captain Flint, looking, for the first time, a little astonished.

      “He was listening through the hawse-hole,” said Peter Duck.

      “There’s something very funny about all this,” said Captain Flint.

      “You may well say that,” said Peter Duck. “Worse than funny, you might say.”

      The others were staring first at Captain Flint and then at the old sailor.

      No one else in the harbour seemed to have noticed that anything had happened. The fiddler was still scraping out a jig tune in one of the vessels over by the market. Foot passengers were crossing the swing bridge. A light showed for a moment on the Viper and then vanished.

      “He’ll have to change everything he’s got on,” said Susan.

      “And then he’ll come charging round with a policeman or two because of our anchor smashing his dinghy,” said Peggy.

      “What a galoot you are,” said Captain Nancy to her mate. “How can he go to the police? He’d have to explain how he happened to be on our anchor and squinting through our hawse-hole . . .”

      “Then he’ll do something else,” said John.

      “It’s as if he’d got something against us,” said Susan.

      “Well, he has now, even if he hadn’t before,” said Nancy cheerfully. “He must have got a nasty shock when he went down with the anchor.”

      “But, but, but . . .” said Roger, but got no further.

      “What’s the fellow after?” said Captain Flint.

      “It’s a long yarn, is that,” said Peter Duck.

      “Let’s have it,” said Captain Flint.

      Peter Duck looked up at the quay above them, dark in the gathering dusk.

      “You never know who might be listening,” he said.

      “Come along to the deckhouse,” said Captain Flint. “We can take a look out now and again to see that no one’s near enough to listen.”

      “Better so,” said Peter Duck.

      “Come on,” said Titty eagerly. There was almost a stampede along the decks, as Captain Flint, taking the lantern with him, walked aft with Peter Duck.

      “What about your bedtime, Roger?” said Susan.

      “Oh, I say,” said Roger. “Just this once . . .”

      And so it happened that the whole ship’s company were crowded into the deckhouse when Peter Duck, sitting on the edge of his bunk, began to spin his yarn.

      ^* The samson-post is a very strong post that goes right through the deck and down to the keel. – NANCY.

CHAPTER V

      PETER DUCK SPINS HIS YARN

      EVERYONE had grown accustomed to Peter Duck. He seemed, somehow, to be part of the ship, and they themselves seemed to have lived in the Wild Cat for a long time. They would have been startled if anyone had suddenly reminded them that the Swallows had come aboard for the first time only three days before, and the Amazons less than a week before them. But now, as they waited for the old sailor to begin, and he sat there on the edge of his bunk, pushing the dottle of tobacco into his pipe with a horny thumb, he seemed different. The light of the lantern hanging under the beam fell on the same old kindly wrinkled face, but it was as if those shrewd old eyes of his were looking at them out of another world. This, perhaps, was because he was remembering things that had happened a very long time ago.

      “By my thinking,” he said at last, “there’s nothing there to make much of a do about. A little money maybe, and if any man were to have it in his own pocket he’d find it burning a hole there, and he’d spend it likely on what he’d be sorry for, and in the end he’d be worse off than if he’d never had the handling of it. By my thinking that’s what it is, and I’ve been sorry enough that ever I tell that yarn to my wife that’s dead now, and my three daughters when they was little girls, thirty years ago maybe or more. It’s been a plague to me ever since, not but what most folk know by now that I’m not going to do a thing about it . . . ”

      “About what?” said Roger.

      “Treasure?” said Captain Flint.

      “About whatever it is,” said Peter Duck. “Whatever it is I saw buried down at the foot of a coconut palm, fifty, sixty, or maybe seventy years ago.”

      “But where were you?” asked Roger.

      “In the coconut tree, of course” said Peter Duck, “in the coconut tree, just waking out of my night’s sleep.”

      Another idea struck Roger. “Did you snore then, too?” he asked.

      “Roger,” said Susan severely.

      “He does now,” said Roger. “Beautifully.”

      “I reckon I didn’t then,” said Peter Duck slowly, “or they’d have heard me and buried it in some other place. And maybe they’d have buried me too,” he added after a pause.

      “Who?”

      “Shut up, Roger,” said Captain Flint. “You’ll hear if you keep your ears open and your mouth shut.”

      “I’d better begin at the beginning,” said Peter Duck, “and tell you how it all come about. You see I’d slipped my cable out of Lowestoft, and gone to London in a coaster. And I’d run away from her at Greenhithe, and then in the docks I shipped aboard a fine vessel trading to the Brazils, shipped as cabin-boy I had, when I was no bigger than this ship’s boy that keeps wanting me to crowd on topsails before my anchor’s fair out of the ground. We’d a fair passage across the Western Ocean but it ended over soon. Struck a pampero or a Sugar Coast hurricane or one of them other big winds she did, and lost both her sticks and broke her back, and we took to the boats and she smashed one of them, and the other one, the one that I was in, didn’t last long, but a seaman in her lashed me to a spar, and the next I knew was that I was washed up, beached good and proper on a bit of an island. There was a big surf roaring along that shore, and if I’d chosen any other place I’d have had the life pounded out of me at once, but I’d had no choosing in it, being lashed to the spar and half drowned anyways, and I was washed up between some rocks into a narrow little hole of a place where the surf didn’t run though the spray was spouting over from the swell that was rolling in against the rocks outside. I never