Again his cousins pulled him away from Lisa and back into the fray of a Cabot family picnic. “Listen—here it comes,” Prentiss was saying, pointing toward the porch.

The boys listened as their Uncle Gil retold his favorite story, the same one he told at every spring picnic. “Marshall says to me, he says, ‘I believe I’ve seen all this ol’ camp has to offer.’ And I says, ‘What you plan on doin’ about it?’ That’s when he pointed at the bicycles Papa had left for us. He says, ‘I’m gonna ride my bicycle to Key West and see what those islands look like.’”

The cousins finished the story with their uncle, repeating his favorite line in unison: “And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the last time Marshall Cabot ever let anybody tell him what to do.”

Winston leaned back to rest against the oak tree. “How many times you reckon he’s told that story?”

“How many spring picnics we had?” Prentiss answered. “Every time he tells it, Uncle Marshall makes the trip in less time.”

Looking up at the sprawling branches above, Peyton watched one squirrel chase another, spiraling up the trunk for several feet and then racing back down again. They repeated their circular journey over and over, as if they were following a racetrack around the tree.

“Reckon they know there’s a whole big world outside that oak?” he said.

“Who you talkin’ about?” Winston asked.

Peyton pointed to the squirrels above. “Those little guys. Reckon they think this tree is all there is—the whole wide world up in those branches?”

“Seriously?” Winston threw a twig at him and missed. “I think a squirrel’s a squirrel.”

The boys were quiet for a while before Prentiss said, “How long did it take your daddy to get to that dang island?”

Peyton listened to the oak tree sighing in the spring breeze. “I got his old map out and figured it up. Looks like it’s somewhere in the neighborhood o’ six hundred miles from that old boys’ camp on the Okefenokee to Key West, so twelve hundred there and back. And he wrote dates on different spots on the map—not everywhere he stopped because the dates are too far apart. No way he pedaled two hundred miles without resting somewhere—doubt anybody could make it more than fifty in a day. And it looked like he stayed awhile in St. Augustine. But judging by the dates after he left there, I’d say that leg of it, at least, took him about a month.”

“And nobody came after him?” Prentiss wanted to know.

“He said he promised Granddaddy Cabot that if they’d let him be, he’d call collect every Sunday to let ’em know he was alright, which he did.”

“Ain’t no way he saddled a bicycle for a month,” Winston said. “He musta thumbed some rides.”

“Well, hold on now,” Peyton said, sitting up. “’Course you’d have to stop and rest along the way. You’d have to figure all that out before you left. And you’d prob’ly wear out your tires over and over, so that’d have to be worked out. Then there’s your clothes and food . . .”