And by the time he had hauled half the string, he was actually enjoying himself—the good strain on his muscles and the smell of his sweat in the warm sun. He shared in the disappointment when a trap came up empty, in the joy when it broke surface, packed with the blue-black critters, and when another sloop passed near and her crew waved, he joined Isaiah and Toby in waving back, feeling himself to have been pledged to a kind of fraternity. Something like letdown came over him when the last trap was rebaited and tossed overboard.

“Yer debt’s paid,” Isaiah said. “Where d’ye want to be dropped?”

“My boat. My brothers and I are living on a boat.”

“Yer yacht, ye mean?”

“All right, yeah, my yacht, my goddammed yacht, and make it quick. J. P. Morgan is aboard, waiting for me to smoke a cigar with him, after we’ve had our caviar.”

Isaiah Kent laughed.

“Okay. Bein’ a yachtsman, ye can help me bring her in. Toby’s got a back like ironwood, and the boy knaows where lobstuhs er gone ta be ’fore they do, but he can’t sail a boat anymore’n he kin fly a balloon to Rio de Janeiro. Got us a good wind, and here’s what we’re gone to do. Fall off till the tops’ls fill, and we’ll tear inta harbor at an outrageous rate. When we git near onto the midchannel buoy, we’ll douse the jib tops’l and keep on goin’ under main, maintop, and stays’l, which be right civilized sails, don’t need much tendin’. Later on, we’ll douse the maintop and the stays’l, and come up to yer yacht on the main alone, and dependin’ on how out of control we be at the time, we’ll either put a hole in her or we’ll ease up on her so soft that if there be a raw egg between yer vessel and mine, it won’t break.”

And that was exactly how the return trip went. Though an egg might have broken, it would not have broken much, so sweetly did the sloop’s gunwale kiss Double Eagle’s. He shook hands with the two men—Isaiah’s grip was as crushing as his son’s—and hopped aboard the schooner, feeling happy and sad at the same time.

“Right smart-lookin’ vessel,” said the old man. “ ’Pears to be modeled after one o’ Burgess’s designs. Like the old Fredonia.”

“How did you know?”

“Partly, it’s that clipper bow ye got, mostly, it’s on account of I sailed on the Fredonia’s sister ship, back when I worked the Grand Banks. The Nellie Dixon.”

Then Toby shoved them off, and Isaiah pointed up and commenced to sail away.