Watching it chuff past flagpoles and steeples, his eyes reaching to the escarpments of buildings beyond, Nathaniel thought of Maine, and how the hamlets there were dominated by the surrounding forests, how even in certain parts of Boston he could imagine what the city looked like when it was a colonial outpost on the edge of a wilderness. New York did not allow any such fanciful pictures; here, nature had not been conquered but annihilated, and yet here the hand of man had fashioned something equal to a natural wonder in its capacity to make you feel insignificant.

The boatyard was near Pier 22, toward the lower end of South Street and in the shadow of the bridge that dwarfed everything. The yard manager, a stubby Scot too recently emigrated to have lost his burr, offered dockage at the rate of a nickel per foot per day. Will paid the fee, since coming to New York had been his idea, and Double Eagle was shoe-horned between a lighter and a canal barge bedecked with laundry.

Relieved to be off the river and its scary traffic, Nathaniel stretched out on the cabin top and stared at the hazy sky.

“Kinda late to bring this up, but we don’t know where Lockwood lives,” he said to Eliot. “Any idea how we’re going to find him in this anthill of people?”

“Gleason’s Boarding House, number fourteen James Slip, wherever that is.”

This from Drew. Crooking his neck, Nathaniel looked at him quizzically.

“I saw it on a letter Mother sent him last Christmas,” Drew said, to explain how he had learned the address.

“You’re in luck, James Slip is just up the pike aways,” said Will. “And there’s a first-rate public bath at the corner of Franklin. The water steams, the tubs are copper, and the towels thick as carpets.”

As they walked up South Street, New York assaulted their senses with a directness and a zeal unfelt on the river—their sense of smell particularly. Wagons and carts were parked all along the quay by the Fulton Market, hundreds more jostled down the street. The eye-watering stench of manure, compounded with the stink of sewage and of dead fish, oysters, and clams streaming out of the packing houses, was so thick it was almost tangible. Their ears took a beating, too. A piledriver banged, an elevated train screeched as it swung its cars around a curve; a freighter, moored alongside a warehouse bearing the name THE STANDARD FRUIT COMPANY, let out a shrill blast that drowned out a dark-haired man cursing in Italian at the stevedores loading a big banana wagon. Nathaniel noticed that most of the ships were steamers; only in a few places did he see spars and masts and bowsprits, thrusting outward with the anachronistic gallantry of cavalry lances. Powered vessels, after all, transformed delivery dates from hopes into promises.