The two younger boys tumbled out and shuffled into the cabin. Eliot kindled a fire in the stove and made coffee and fried a pound of bacon in the heavy iron skillet. The stove made the cabin stuffy, so Drew opened a couple of portholes, and then everyone crowded around the folding table and ate and washed breakfast down with mugs of the scalding coffee Will dubbed “Lazarus brew”—strong enough to raise the dead.

“I don’t feel raised, just yet,” Eliot said. “I was awake half the night, thinking.”

“Me, too,” said Drew. “Gee, but it’s an awful long way. That’s what I was thinking. How it’s an awful long way.”

Nathaniel blew out the lamp, for morning twilight had begun to pour through the portholes in beams like the beams from an electric torch, except they were dull silver instead of white.

“Feet getting cold, little man?”

“No! I was figuring that if we sailed east as far as we’re going south, we’d be halfway across the Atlantic.”

“Just about on the money,” said Will, going to the charts, now blackened with rhumb lines and compass bearings. “Thirteen hundred and seventy-five nautical miles, as the crow flies, but since we’re not crows, figure our distance over water will be sixteen hundred.” With the point of a pencil, he tracked the rhumbs, which would be used only as reference points, not as course bearings. Measuring the shortest distance between Nantucket Shoals and Miami, one line shot straight down the middle of the Gulf Stream, and they could not buck that current for so great a distance and hope to reach Key West before Thanksgiving. Will had explained that to them yesterday, and how they would sail inside the Stream, coasting down in a series of long tacks, Nantucket southwestward to a point off Norfolk, then due south to Cape Hatteras, that dread necropolis of luckless ships, and from there southwestward again to Daytona Beach, Daytona to Miami, and then a westering leg of some one hundred fifty miles to Key West. “There’ll be times, I figure,” Will continued, “when the wind will be blowing straight into this boat’s nostrils. If we’re lucky, we’ll average four knots and make it in three weeks, but I wouldn’t count on less than a month.”

“Exactly what I figured.” Nathaniel, squaring his shoulders, wished to remind all that he was the captain. “But coming back, we’ll have the Stream astern and winds abaft, and then you watch this schooner fly. We might set a record. I’m going to like that, getting way out there in that Gulf Stream.”

With a couple of looks, he told Eliot and Drew to clear and scrub the dishes and the skillet. Will stood, gave the lamp a push to make it swing on the gimbal, and watched it settle back to its original position, steady as a lamp in a room ashore.