“In the one above it, the one in his uniform, he does. But Aunt Judith said it was taken before that battle Kincaid talked about. Spring of 1862. In the other picture, Mother looks like she’s about six months old, so it would have been taken about the same time.”

“Maybe she was younger than six months?” Eliot offered. He sometimes found it difficult to follow the turns of his older brother’s mind.

“Yeah, maybe. That’s what I’m wondering. If our grandfather could have grown a big thick mustache like that in only a few weeks, say. Or if that picture was taken earlier than she said.”

“It’s Nat Pinkerton, star detective, on the case again. Are you saying that one of those guys isn’t Granddad?”

“It’s him in both, all right. I’m wondering if the baby isn’t Mother.”

And the wondering plagued him for most of the night. Was the infant their mother’s older brother, and if it was, why had she never spoken of him? Why would Aunt Judith have lied to them? He turned and re-turned the questions in his mind, but could not find even the beginning of an answer before he fell asleep.

16

IN THE MORNING, after Frenchy Geslin told them it would be a few days before the new sail was finished, they returned to Snead’s Landing by way of the Beaufort River and discovered that the carpenter had yet to put a saw to the pine sawlog. After some prodding, Sykes cut it to the desired lengths; prodded some more the next day, he began to mill and plane the spars to the desired roundness and smoothness, but with such slow movements that he appeared to be working against a resistance, like a submerged diver.

The muggy heat made the boys feel that they were indeed living undersea, and the sandflies were an added torment, the plague of insects aggravated by a plague of visitors—the townsfolk who found Double Eagle and her crew of young northerners an irresistible novelty. The gaunt worn women, the men wearing bib overalls or trousers held up with ropes in place of belts were a taciturn lot who boarded the schooner without asking permission, some to poke around her with the perfunctory inquisitiveness of detectives seeking evidence to support a conviction already decided upon, others to sit mutely on the afterdeck and watch the boys’ every move with looks suspicious and curious at the same time. The greatest strain was not knowing what to say to the uninvited guests or what to do with them. Like Kincaid, the people had an air of touchy pride that might be offended with a wrong word or a wrong move, and that gave Snead’s Landing the atmosphere of some foreign court, governed by social rules strangers were not permitted to know.