"That is a sight it's better not to see," replied the pilot.
"But you have to be out, storm or not, pilot?"
"It is my way of getting a living," he answered, shortly.
Salvé stood and listened, as the conversation took this turn.
"We have pilots in Norway, too," she said, "who don't mind a wet jacket either. It is a fine life!"
The Dutchman merely observed, coldly, in reply—
"In two successive years—it is three years ago now—they lost out here off Amland a total of fifty pilots."
"Still, it is a fine life!" she said; and Salvé resumed his walk.
A couple of evenings after, the Apollo was pitching out on the Doggerbank in the moonlight, with a reef in her topsails. Elizabeth had not yet gone below, and was sitting with her child warmly wrapped up on her lap, while Salvé paced the deck and looked at her from time to time. A little farther off, near the main-hatch, Nils Buvaagen (whom Salvé had met again at Notterö, and persuaded to take service with him) and a couple of the crew who were off duty were engaged in story-telling, the others lounging about near them to listen. Elizabeth, too, was listening.
They had crossed that day a long stretch of dead water, and the carpenter had several mysterious incidents, of which he declared he had been an eyewitness, to recount on the head of it. Meeting dead water like that out in the open sea generally meant that something was going to happen.