midday
He even paused beside me to gossip for a moment about the French restaurants of San Francisco and how , therein , the delectable California fashion of cooking wild duck obtained . `` Throw 'em through the fire , '' he chanted . `` That 's the way -- throw 'em through the fire -- a hot oven , sixteen minutes -- I take mine fourteen , to the second -- an ' squeeze the carcasses . '' By midday the snow had ceased and we were bowling along before a stiff breeze . At three in the afternoon we were running before a growing gale . It was across a mad ocean we tore , for the mounting sea that made from eastward bucked into the West End Drift and battled and battered down the huge south-westerly swell . And the big grinning dolt of a Finnish carpenter , already food for fish and bird , was astern there somewhere in the freezing rack and drive .