“So do you make it three, little brother?” Nathaniel asked.

“Gee, Nat, I don’t know.… What about Mother?”

“Oh, Mother. Mother, Mother,” said Nathaniel wearily. “We’ll send her a telegram. Tell her where we’re going. That’ll be a job for you and Eliot. Take the ferry to Camden this afternoon while Will and I work out the course. So what it’ll be? No sense in thinking about it, you either go or you don’t.”

“Oh, all right … sure,” answered Drew, after a long pause.

Then Nathaniel turned to the last holdout.

“Three lunatics against one sane man.” Eliot shook his head, not in the negative but in disbelief at himself. “I can’t let three lunatics go off on their own. It would be on my conscience.”

And so they resolved to leave on the next morning’s tide, the three brothers together, children of the sea in quest of a father’s love, never knowing that love was the last thing they could expect from him.…

9

NONE OF THEM got to sleep till after midnight, and they were all awake an hour before dawn. Nathaniel was the first out of his bunk. Yawning, stretching, shaking life into his brain, he lit the lamp in the main cabin, and saw Will stretched out on the cabin sole without pillow or blanket. Late yesterday, he had said so long to his friends on the yawl and transferred himself and his belongings to Double Eagle. He had gone to bed in the starboard berth forward, and now he was sprawled on the cabin sole, eyes wide open, and Nathaniel asked what he was doing there.

“Must’ve been walking in my sleep. Forgot to warn you. The last year or so, I’ve started to sleepwalk.”

“Oh. Thought maybe you didn’t find your quarters to your liking.”

“The bunk did leave something to be desired, compared to the one I had,” Will said, cheerfully. He stood up in his drawers and massaged his scalp and scratched his ribs. “What the hell have you got for a mattress and springs on this ship? Felt like I was in a hayloft.”

Nathaniel told him that in a way he had been; the mattresses on Double Eagle were made of horse breakfasts: gunny sacks filled with straw and sewn together with twine; and there were no springs in the bunks, only oak slats.

“Papa’s way of making sure you don’t get soft?”

“Nope. Yacht mattresses don’t dry quickly if they get wet and then they mildew. Straw gets wet, you replace it. Springs rust, oak doesn’t. Hey, Drew, Eliot. Up and at ’em. We’ll want to make sail on this tide.”