The other day, Dugan said, Andrew had asked him to add up the yellowing invoices he had kept from the years he was building her. There were paid bills for blocks, winches, 10,000 galvanized screws, galley pumps, bilge pumps, compass, clocks, barometers, switches and cables. “Lead for the keel. And lumber! Jesus, the lumber: mahogany, apitong, spruce, teak, cedar, oak for her frames, stuff you couldn’t hardly find after the war. And can’t find now at all. That’s what you paid for. That’s all you paid for.”

“I wondered,” muttered Mitch. “No labor?”

“He told me,” said Dugan, “he’d already been paid for the labor.”

Chapter 11

CHAPTER 11

He felt the luff of the sail throbbing behind him as he teetered on the yardarm. His treasonous back was still to the mast. He must somehow get down for the noon sunsight. Above him the sky was becoming a great lens, focusing on his brain.

The ketch pitched and he tottered on his perch. He was falling. He made a wild, backhanded grab at the mast behind him. He stopped the fall, gripping the sailtrack so hard that his fingertips hurt. It was 11:40. He had nine minutes to get below and shoot the sun.

He swept the ocean one last time. The sea had turned almost purple. The wind was picking up. There were a dozen whitecaps between him and his horizon and nothing else.

With great care, he raised his knee with his hand. The pain hit, but he somehow tolerated it long enough to hoist his foot over the spreader. He rolled a hip under his body. Groping with his toes for the shortest and highest of the rungs on the mast-shrouds, he missed. Linda Lee reared on a swell and he slipped.

He had a quick image of his body hurtling twenty-five feet to the deck. He hugged the spreader with knees and hands and swung to rest suspended like a giant sloth beneath the yardarm. He probed for a foothold, found a rung with his toes, and climbed down.

His heart knocked and he poured sweat, but his back felt no worse. He had apparently developed a new and relatively painless maneuver to get off the crosstree, if he could find the guts to do it voluntarily. Safely on deck, he reached to the highest rung he could touch and hung for a moment, feet dangling, to stretch. This had always given him relief, and when he let himself down he found that he could stand erect.

At the hatchway he saw M. le Chat lying by the lazarette, waiting for the chirping. A midnight scenario flashed through his mind, as good a guess as any at how she had been lost.