“That’s Tom Holgrum and his son, Billy,” Talmadge said, watching them row away, across a flat sound mirroring the sunset. “Y’know, the boy Clara was sweet on?” Pausing, he looked at Will amiably. “Which brings me to my main business in comin’ out here. Clara tells me y’all kissed her today.”

Will blinked.

“I ain’t mad, son. That is, I ain’t if you wasn’t takin’ advantage of her.”

“I did not kiss her, sir.”

“She says you did.”

“Excuse me, but just how did she tell you?”

“We got our ways of communicatin’. Y’all sayin’ that girl was fibbin’? She ain’t never fibbed to me before.”

“No, I’m not saying that.”

“So you did kiss her?”

“No!”

“Lemme get this straight”—rubbing his chin. “If she told me you kissed her, and you say she ain’t fibbin’, then in my book that says you kissed her.”

The Braithwaites rushed as one to Will’s defense, swearing that Will had not touched Clara in any way. He had in fact run from her when she made it plain that she wanted to be kissed. This confounded Talmadge, who said he had never in all his days heard of a normal young man running from a girl eager to be kissed.

“Now, look here, Clara ain’t just sweet on you, Will, like she was with Billy. Plumb in love is what she is. She knows you got to be leavin’ right soon, and she is sick to heart about it.”

Will expressed his regrets; sad departures, however, were part of the sailor’s life.

“But what if she was to go with y’all down to Flor’da? She wouldn’t be sad then.”

The proposal was too shocking for any of them to respond.

“That’s the reason I come here to show you the inland route. I’d want her to be safe if she did.”

He, had been thinking things over, and praying on them, too, he went on, and it had come to him in recent days that he could repay his debt to the Lord in full if he married Clara off to the right man. When he heard about the kiss, he was pretty sure Will was that man, and so was his wife—she was up and about again. He intended to speak about the matter with the Reverend Dewey Jenkins when he arrived to conduct Sunday meeting.

“That’s but day after tomorrow, so I reckoned it would be proper to hear what you got to say before I go speakin’ to the reverend.”

Will, looking more stunned than when he’d been punched in New York, had nothing whatever to say.