A ship’s whistle sounded out on the river. Mooring lines creaked and Double Eagle rocked gently, as the wake rolled ashore.

“Trouble with you, Nat, is that you think everything’s a sport and everyone’s a sportsman.”

Nathaniel felt a little annoyed. Drew had done a fine thing, but that didn’t entitle him to make such judgments.

“I didn’t think there was a damn thing sporty about it. I knew the guy was playing for keeps. Still and all, I was taught to fight fair. Know what gets me, more than anything? I can’t figure out what I did to make him so mad at me that he wanted to beat my head in.”

Drew lowered his gaze. Nat didn’t get it, he thought. Nat never would. Nat the sportsman, fighting fair. Having been bullied and threatened so many times, having suffered taunts from classmates only because he was smaller, it was easier for Drew than for his brothers to understand the moral of tonight’s story.

“There’s a meanness in some people, a real big meanness, and it’s just there,” he said. “They don’t need a reason.”

In gray light, while cloud fleets sped over the city, they rode the ebb downriver and, catching a whole-sail sou’wester, beat into New York Bay, nicking past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, stone torch raised against a sky darkened by blast furnaces flaring from the marshes on the Jersey shore. The flashes came unexpectedly and without pattern, so that it looked as though patches of air were spontaneously catching fire.

Down through the Narrows to the Lower Bay, where the wind hauled to the west, allowing them to reach for open sea, Double Eagle, lunging not through the waves but over them, a creature neither of air nor water but belonging to both, like a storm petrel or flying fish. Astern, they watched as the city fell away until nothing could be seen of it save the long reefs of smoke above it, incarnadined by the sunrise, and then the smoke sunk below the horizon. Eliot went below to cook breakfast, singing the sentiments of the entire crew.

This New York town ain’t no town for me,

Away Rio!

I’m packin’ my bags and goin’ to sea,

For we’re bound to the Rio Grande.

They ate on deck, with sparks from the Charley Noble flying leeward. Nathaniel used his fingers to scoop up the hash because he could not grasp a utensil. Will managed to eat by passing the fork between his bruised lips and swallowing whole. He couldn’t smoke afterward, which made him irritable, and when he tried to speak, he sounded as if part of his tongue had been cut out. It frustrated him to be so conversationally impaired, so he went below to read a book. Drew joined him, bent on solving the mysteries of the Nautical Almanac and the Tables.