They banged on the deckhouse door.
“He’s back! He’s here! Mr. Duck’s back again!”
Captain Flint came out in a hurry, drying his chin.
“Good for him,” he said. “Where is he?”
Peter Duck came to the edge of the quay and rolled his kitbag off his shoulder. It fell with a thud on the deck, and was followed by a bundle of oilskins. He came slowly down the ladder in his big sea-boots, that he was wearing to save having to carry them.
“Come aboard, sir,” he said.
“Fine,” said Captain Flint, shaking hands with him.
“We’re all very glad to see you.”
“You’re just in time for breakfast,” said Susan, putting her head out of the galley. “At least, it’ll be ready in two minutes. The water must be just going to boil.”
Outside there, on deck, nobody, not even Captain Flint, could take his eyes from Peter Duck’s kitbag. It was an ordinary canvas kitbag, but it had a large coat of arms painted on it. There was a shield divided into four quarters. In one were three ducks swimming on curly waves. In another was a Norfolk wherry under full sail. In the third were three flying-fish, and in the fourth were three dolphins. Above the shield, by way of a crest, there was a capstan with a turn or two of rope about it, and below the shield in big clear letters was written “Admiral Peter Duck.”
The old sailor laughed when he saw what they were looking at. “It’s a long while ago since that was painted,” he said. “We had three days’ calm in the China seas and all the fo’c’sle took to painting coats of arms, because the fish wasn’t biting.”
“And are you really an admiral?” asked Titty.
“Why not?” said Peter Duck. “The cook in that vessel was a rare good hand at dragons. So he painted dragons in all four corners of his shield and called himself the Emperor of China.”
Just then Roger pulled at Titty. “There’s that man again,” he whispered. “He’s come right round.”
Titty looked up, startled. The others, seeing her, looked up, too.
A man was standing on the edge of the quay, right above them, a dark man, with black hair and big gold ear-rings that showed below his hair. He stood there glowering down at the little group on the deck of the Wild Cat. Peter Duck glanced up at him. The man opened his lips, but he did not say a word.
“Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!” screamed the parrot in the sunshine.
The man scowled, turned sharp round and walked hurriedly away.
“What on earth’s the matter with that man?” said Captain Flint.
“It’s the sort of man he is,” said Peter Duck.
“Roger’s quite right,” said Titty. “He is the man who tried to grab the parrot when we were coming from the station.”
“He didn’t exactly grab it,” said John. “He just got angry and wouldn’t leave us alone.”
“He was watching us from the boat,” said Roger.
“He owns her,” said Peter Duck.
“Hullo, is she still there?” said Captain Flint. “The harbourmaster told me she was sailing last night.”
“There he goes, over the bridge,” said Roger.
A minute or two later they saw him come out on the south quay and speak to some men who were busy with the schooner’s warps. They saw him pointing across at the Wild Cat.
“Why do they call him Black Jake?” Titty asked. “Is it because of his hair?”
“Because of his heart,” said Peter Duck.
“Queer sort of cove,” said Captain Flint. “Now, Mr. Duck, will you come along and stow your dunnage in the deckhouse. There’s a good big locker under that starboard bunk. And then we’ll see what sort of a breakfast these mates of ours are going to give us.”
At that first breakfast with Peter Duck at one end of the long narrow table and Captain Flint at the other, everybody was rather shy. Captain Flint and Peter Duck talked a little, mostly about the Thermopylæ and old days in sailing ships, while everybody else watched and listened. As soon as it was over, work began in earnest. Every rope in the ship was to be overhauled, for one thing. “You don’t want gear going bad on you at sea,” Peter Duck had said, and Captain Flint agreed. There was no point in going out even for a trial trip until everything was as right as they could make it. He had got rid of the carpenters a month before. Then there had been all the painting and varnishing. Then there had been the storing of the ship. He had stored her so well that he had the happiness of knowing that nothing was out of his reach, the Mediterranean, America, or the South Seas. And yet, it seemed there was still a tremendous lot to do before he could even take his ship outside the harbour.
“No. No. Wait to see how we get on,” he had said when Titty had asked about the launching of the Swallow. “We shall want help this morning, but if all goes well we’ll put her over in the afternoon.”
All that morning they worked, and, all morning, people passing along the quay stopped to look down at the little schooner and up at Mr. Duck, who spent most of the time at the top of one or other of the two masts. Everybody seemed to know him. Everybody had a word for him. Even the harbourmaster, the greatest man of the whole port, with gold on his cap and on his dark blue coat, strolled up and stopped for a minute or two.
“Quite like old times for you, Mr. Duck,” he called up.
“And old times were good times,” Mr. Duck called down from the mainmast cross-trees.
Roger and Gibber had vanished soon after breakfast. Everybody knew they must be in the engine-room. Susan and Peggy went marketing. John, Nancy, and Titty were helping on deck, passing things up at the end of a line to Captain Flint or Peter Duck when they were up the masts, or just hanging on to a rope here or a rope there when they were told. They were being very useful, but they had plenty of time to look about them, and they could not help seeing that all morning they were being watched from the black schooner at the other side of the harbour. The men over there had stopped shifting her warps. She was clearly not going to sea that day.
Everybody aboard the Wild Cat was very hungry when Susan and Peggy, after coming back laden from the market and trying what they could do with the galley stove, decided that the potatoes had been boiled long enough and that the mutton chops would be burnt if they tried to give them another minute’s cooking. When Peggy banged the big bell just inside the galley door there was a cheerful rush from all parts of the ship. There was no hanging back. The cooks of the Wild Cat did not have to complain that people let their dinners get cold. Indeed, Roger was very unwilling to go and wash some of the dirt off first, when he came crawling out from the dark engine-room, round the companion steps and into the saloon.
Work had gone very well.
“We’ll be going to sea tomorrow, eh, Mr. Duck?” Captain Flint said as they sat down at the saloon table.
“There’ll
