The voice roused Eliot but not his shipmates. Looking at them, sprawled in their oilskins, he reckoned they were doing a pretty good imitation of corpses. After setting the anchors, they all four had sat down on deck for a breather, and there they had passed out.

“Y’all appear to be this side of the grave. How about your friends?”

The speaker, standing at the tiller of an oyster sloop hove alongside Double Eagle, looked a little like one of the risen dead himself. He wasn’t just thin, he was cadaverous, with a worm of a neck, sunken chest, and knobby shoulders from which a white cotton shirt hung in loose folds. He had a fisherman’s face, weather-seamed and burned to the color of cork, and though his voice belonged to a young or a middle-aged man, his hair was pure silver. Faded blue eyes goggled from behind spectacles whose thickness testified that he was almost as blind as he was scrawny.

Eliot gave Nathaniel, Drew, and Will each a poke in the ribs. They stirred, rubbed their faces, and cast confused gazes at the sloop and its skipper. Beyond, not two hundred yards away, a white beach, pierced here and there by inlets and river mouths, stretched north and south as far as they could see. The sun burned high in a flawless sky, and the air was like warm maple syrup but without the sweetness, reeking instead of the tidal flats spread all around, brown as coffee from mud churned up by the gale.

It came to them that they could not have been this close to land when they dropped the hook; the anchors must have dragged in the poor holding ground, and a flood tide carried Double Eagle inshore until the anchors grabbed again.

“Mornin’,” said the oysterman, with a bobbing of his prominent Adam’s apple. He squinted at the sun and added, “Make that afternoon.”

They nodded, and he, giving a one-fingered salute, announced himself as Phineas Talmadge. He had spotted their vessel half an hour ago and thought he’d come on out for a look, schooners being a rare sight in these thin coastal waters.

“Mind telling us where we might be?” asked Will.

“Can’t say where you might be, but I can say where you are, and that’s off the mouth of St. Helene Sound, in the fine state of South Car’lina.”

South Carolina! They must have been driven at least fifty miles north of Savannah.

“Now I see by your transom that y’all hail from Blue Hill. Where is that?”

“Maine,” answered Nathaniel, and felt pride when he saw Talmadge’s eyes bulge a little wider.

“Maine! I ain’t sure how far that is, but I know it’s got to be right far. Was your boat caught in yesterday’s blow? She looks it. Whoo-ee! That blow was a honey.”

“We were, Mr. Talmadge.”