“It’ll give us something to aim for, I suppose,” he said, shrugging casually. A difference of three years is a very big difference in adolescence, and Will did not wish to appear that he was taking orders from one younger than he. “Of course, it will be impossible, maybe even silly, but it might be amusing to try.”

“It ain’t just silly, it’s nutty,” Eliot remarked, while his already low estimation of Will fell another notch. Their eldest member should be talking sense to Nat instead of encouraging his screwy scheme. “Dad was a professional with a professional crew, and he couldn’t find that stuff, but you think we can? Nat, we don’t even know where that wreck is.”

“There’s bound to be folks in Key West who do.”

“It went down more than twenty years ago! There’s probably nothing left to her, and that stuff is all a pile of rust by now.”

“Gold doesn’t rust, you know that.” This from Drew, sitting on the top rung of the companionway with Trajan in his lap.

“Are you saying you go along with this idea?”

“What if we did it, Eliot? Found the stuff and brought it up?”

“I reckon we’d be rich.”

“We’d have done something the old man couldn’t do. Something he won’t be able to criticize us for or take away from us. Right, Nat? Isn’t that why you got this idea?”

“I don’t think about why I do things,” replied Nathaniel, who possessed in full the Anglo-Saxon male’s love of activity and disdain for introspection. And yet, he knew his brothers shared his longing, knew that they wanted what he did—maybe not as deeply, yet they did want it. And he played on that, exhorting them, inspiring them with the vision that had inspired him—of the welcome that would be theirs when they returned.

“Imagine it, the Dry Tortugas,” he carried on. “It’s just a short sail to Havana from there. We could send the old man postals from Cuba! Imagine how that will bowl him over, when he sees that we made it to a foreign country, not a fake foreign country like Canada but a real one.”

“I like the Havana part, Natters.” A look of merriment brightened Will’s face. “I speak Spanish. Took it for my foreign language requirement, since it’s so much easier than French. There are said to be sporting women in Havana who do things these dried-up figs of Yankee women couldn’t imagine doing, and wouldn’t do if they could.”

“What … what sort of things?” Drew asked, in a voice suggesting that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to hear the answer.

“Not for innocent ears.” Will rifled through the charts. “Looks like we don’t have any for Cuba,” he said. “We’ll have to pick some up on the way down.”