THROUGH ISLETS of electric lamp light, through channels of darkness between, they made their way back to the boat, Will with a napkin pressed to his mouth—there would be no entertainment for him tonight—Nathaniel hawking up pinkish phlegm, no one speaking. The thunder of the great city was subdued now, but not altogether silenced. Cabs rattled on the brick pavement, an elevated train rumbled in the distance. The four boys hurried on with the wary silence of a patrol in enemy territory. They reached the wharf and at last came to Double Eagle, and how welcome she looked.

Below, Eliot lit the lamp and broke out the medicine chest for cotton swabs, bandages, iodine. He daubed Will’s swollen lips, and filled a pan from the water tank and chipped ice off the block in the ice chest and put the ice in the water so Nathaniel could soak his fractured knuckles. Still, no one spoke. They could find no reason to boast about their triumph; it had been too close a thing, won at too high a cost. In Nathaniel’s mind, the whole episode didn’t seem like something that had happened to him, but to a character in some terrible fantasy. To walk into a place expecting to eat dinner and, in minutes, find himself fighting for his life, with a stranger who hated him for no reason, was beyond his understanding of how the world was supposed to work. Nor could he quite grasp the reality of what Drew had done. His kid brother had a capacity for swift and ruthless action—that was something else he never could have predicted. Now, breaking the silence, he thanked him.

Drew, slumped on the settee behind the galley table, shrugged diffidently and said, “You’re my brother.”

“Weren’t you scared?”

“No.” Drew hesitated, thinking that his answer needed some elaboration, lest it sound like boasting. “I didn’t feel anything. The club was right there at my feet and I picked it up and hit him with it and I didn’t think about it. If I’d thought about it for half a second, I wouldn’t have done it, but it was like blinking your eyes when somebody pokes a finger at them.”

“Did you mean what you said? That you meant to kill him?”

“He was trying to kill you.”

“Maybe.”

“He was.” Drew looked up at the skylight contemplatively. It framed a constellation, maybe Cassiopeia. He wasn’t sure, because the stars were dimmed by city lights and haze. “You should have done what that guy said.”

“What guy?”

“The guy behind me, the guy who told you to finish him.”

“But he looked finished. I’d busted his nose.…”

“You should’ve kicked him in the face, hard as you could. He would’ve been finished then.”

“Hey, little brother, I wasn’t taught to kick a man who’s down, and neither were you.”