Forgetting all about Charlie, the skipper hurried away to look at the new craft, and found that the news was true. Very bad news he considered it, for he knew that the North Sea fishermen never came aboard a coper if there was a mission ship with the fleet. Tobacco is sold cheaper on a mission ship than on a coper, and naturally the fishermen, who have very little money to spend, buy in the cheapest market. Moreover, every man aboard a mission ship is a friend of the fishermen, and there is not a trawler in the North Sea on which it is not possible to find two or three men who have good reasons for blessing mission ships. Hundreds of men have been carried aboard these floating hospitals and nursed back to health.
When the mission ship was about half a mile from the Lily, Charlie said to the coper skipper: 'Now is your chance to get rid of Ping Wang and me. Hail that boat and send us aboard her.'
'Hail a craft like that?' the skipper answered roughly. 'I'd sink her with pleasure if I had the chance; but as for hailing her——I'd rather die!'
'I'll give you a sovereign to take us aboard her.'
'Wouldn't do it for ten sovereigns.'
Charlie went back to Ping Wang and told him of the skipper's decision.
'I'm not surprised,' Ping Wang declared. 'He will sail off as quickly as possible, I fancy.'
That, indeed, was the coper skipper's intention. He wished to start immediately, and would have done so had it not been for the two thieves who were drinking in the saloon.
'Now then,' said the skipper, coming down to the saloon and addressing the thieves, 'if you won't leave, I shall have to sail off with you.'
'Right you are; I don't care,' one of them declared, and the other added that he would thoroughly enjoy a cruise in a coper.