Will suffered under an additional burden: Every time he and the Braithwaites went ashore to check on Sykes’s progress at the sawmill, poor Clara would appear and shadow Will, gazing with her usual trancelike expression. On their fifth day in Snead’s Landing, after the carpenter promised to finish the spars tomorrow, Clara’s manner changed. She approached Will, making gestures and guttural sounds whose meaning made no sense at first. Then, realizing she was asking him to kiss her or for permission to kiss him, he fled down the main street (the only street in fact, the others being but paths and dirt lanes between the shanties), the Braithwaites behind him, laughing at his distress (though even as he laughed, Eliot could not help but feel pity for the speechless girl).

Late that afternoon, they were called on by a man and a boy in a flat-bottom skiff, with a pile of dead birds between its thwarts and two shotguns propped in its bow. The boy, who was about fifteen, with slanted, slitty eyes and blond hair shorn to bristles, stood and held up three braces of marsh hens while his father, a broad-chested man with a hard, intransigent face, asked if they wanted the birds for supper. Nathaniel asked how much; the man replied by shaking his head, which was interpreted to mean that they were a gift. Nathaniel accepted and invited the hunters aboard for marsh-hen stew. They climbed on and, never uttering a word, plucked and gutted their kill with brutal efficiency. The birds stank of the marshes in which they had nested and of the crabs and fish on which they had fed. They stank raw, and they stank while Eliot cooked them in a big cast-iron skillet with onions and potatoes and garlic that, it was hoped, would disguise their taste.

In the middle of supper, which the man pronounced “right fine,” Double Eagle had another visitor: Talmadge. He tied his skiff alongside the hunters’, muttered hello to them, and, declining a helping of stew, told the boys that he’d heard from Kincaid that the work would be finished the following day, which meant they would be leaving soon, did it not?

“So I thought I’d show y’all a nice, safe, comfortable way down to Flor’da, where you don’t got to worry about gettin’ caught in another blow,” he said. “It’s a inland route. There’s canals and channels what run clear through Georgia and across the Georgia sounds. Got charts aboard?”