“See, Drew’s got sand, more sand than you or the old man ever give him credit for, and now you want to take that away from him,” Eliot was saying.

“I’m not trying to take anything away from him,” Nathaniel protested.

“Sure you are. You don’t want to give him credit, because if you do, you won’t be able to bully him when he gets seasick or doesn’t set a sail to your liking.”

Sorry that he had brought up this subject, Nathaniel said nothing, though he knew that Eliot had a point: Everything in his relations with his kid brother had changed. He would have to treat Drew as an equal, and that would feel unnatural. Still, he had seen what he had seen and heard what he had heard. That dead blank look in Drew’s eyes, the flatness in his voice when he’d said, answering Mike Downey’s sidekick, “I meant to.” There had been something so … so … He groped for a word and found rational. So rational about Drew. A rationality that suggested a streak of cold-bloodedness.

With an old issue of Tip Top Weekly folded in his back pocket, he went forward to sit against the foremast and read.

 … Preparations were being made for the mile run.… Then, at the last moment before the men were called to the mark, a great mad roar went up from the Yale stand. “Merriwell! Merriwell! Merriwell!” Frank Merriwell was seen running across the field.…

His gaze wandered, falling on a sentence here … He shot off the mark with Dalton of Columbia at his shoulder … and a sentence there … Every muscle of his splendid frame was tense, every nerve was strained … and finally left the page altogether. It was one of those rare afternoons that are a sailor’s delight: clouds like brush strokes, a moderate seaway rolling in a moderate breeze, shearwaters skimming the tops of sculpted waves. A school of dolphin appeared, and played around the schooner for a quarter of an hour, diving under her, streaking across her bow like green torpedoes, breaching to make acrobatic leaps, arched backs sleek and sparkling. When they swam away, Nathaniel returned to the artificial entertainment of his magazine.…

… for Merriwell had won at the last moment, and Yale was in the lead.… Men hugged each other, pounded each other, danced and shrieked and also died with joy.… “Merriwell!” roared the throng.…

Oh, come on. The crowd didn’t die with joy, he thought, and tossed the dog-eared magazine overboard, fed up for the time being with Merriwell! Merriwell! He of the splendid frame and never-sullied virtue, who always won at the last moment, always outwitted Chinese bandits and got the drop on Texas rustlers. But Merriwell! Merriwell! had never run into a thug like Mike Downey.