“Well, we owe Mother a letter. We owe it to her to let her know more than what we said in the telegram.” He paused. “And come to think of it, we could look up Lockwood in New York. Maybe he knows what’s going on with the old man. Maybe we could find out if we were right about him being in a pickle and all.”

Nathaniel could feel his crew’s desires as an almost palpable pressure. Already, they needed a rest from the sea. He foresaw mutinous emotions arising if he did not accommodate them.

“Ain’t this bully?” he said, sharply. “I got grief for going twelve miles out of the way and now everybody wants to go a hundred. For a hot bath and to mail a letter. Like we’re nothing but a bunch of seagoing tourists.”

“When you think about it, that’s exactly what we are,” Will said.

They went in past Gardiner’s Island, and then between Plum Island and Orient Point, and reached toward the Connecticut shore, a gentle shore where the rocks looked smaller and less forbidding than in Massachusetts or Maine, and salt meadows cut into shady summer woods surrounding white towns like Mystic and Stonington and Essex. Cruising past the mouth of the Connecticut River, they picked up a passenger, a chestnut-banded kingfisher that landed on their taffrail and rode with them till sunset, when it took off and winged shoreward, into a marsh among whose spartina plains great egrets stalked like predacious angels. By late afternoon, after passing stone lighthouses rising from shoals and isolated rocks (the keepers and their families sometimes waving at them from the towers), they were trolling strips of pork rind behind the boat, along the Norwalk islands. They caught two fair-sized bluefish, and off the Sheffield Light, passed a fisherman who asked where they were bound. They told him and he spat a stream of tobacco juice over the side, but it wasn’t clear if he was just cleaning his mouth or commenting on their chances of ever reaching Key West. “Watch out for Hell Gate when you’re passin’ through New York,” he called from his little sloop. “Don’t try and sail against that current. Rocks enough there to make a nation of striped bass happy. Wait for the ebb and ride it through and hang on tight.”