It was dumb, Drew was saying, from his usual perch atop the cabin, it was worse than dumb to sail twelve miles east when their intended course was south, and for no better reason than to make an offering to some hag who claimed to be sovereign of wind and weather. Steering in a freshening nor’wester—an autumn wind—Nathaniel told him, “Oh, pipe down, you’re making too much of it,” then looked across the bay, sparkling like a jeweled robe of royal blue, toward the heights that gave Isle Au Haut its name. Yes, he had at first taken the tobacco from Cudlip with no intention of using it for the purposes prescribed, but the trader’s yarn had piqued his curiosity about the old legend. Anyway, what harm was there in seeking a little extra good luck? Dad was a rational man and a Christian, yet even he, in accordance with ancient customs, had nailed a horseshoe open end up to the tip of Double Eagle’s bowsprit, and a gold coin to the foot of her mainmast.

They dropped anchor in the cove marked on Cudlip’s map and rowed ashore, passing a shack resting precariously on canted pilings that rose almost as high as telegraph poles against the big Maine tides, the shambles of a pier behind the shack leading in waves like swells on the sea to a boatyard where two ship’s carpenters up on a scaffold were planking the frame of a half-finished hull. The workmen lowered their mallets to watch the four boys beach the tender, and when they saw the strangers start toward the road that punched into the woods, each brought a finger to the bill of his cap and nodded solemnly, as if to say that he knew the purpose of the visit, and acknowledged its rightness and its gravity.

The road, covered with bootprints, ran straight as a corridor through the spruce and hemlock and ended half a mile later in a clearing fenced by what looked like untrimmed hedges but were really the fragments of an old stone wall overgrown with ivy. At the far side, an old barn leaned to one side and a house with paneless windows stood—just barely—under a roof bowed in the middle. Between the two, the remains of a wagon sat on its hubs and axles. Over this scene of dereliction, a pair of crows wheeled, the only signs of sentient life; yet a well-trodden path beat through the high weeds toward the house. Nathaniel followed it, with the note and the Copenhagen in his trouser pocket, Will and his brothers behind in Indian file, all four proceeding warily, like a delegation of nervous petitioners approaching the castle of a moody queen.