They rowed ashore in darkness, made their way to the sawmill—it was at the edge of the settlement, in a grove of oak trees—and opened the shed door. Nathaniel lit the kerosene lantern they had brought along, and it revealed the boom and gaff, braced on sawhorses over piles of sawdust and shavings. Feeling like robbers (though they were only taking what belonged to them), their throats catching whenever a dog barked, they carried both pieces to the water, Will and Nathaniel the boom, the two younger boys taking the lighter gaff. The spars were lashed together, then to the stern of the tender, and towed back to Double Eagle.

Sails were raised, sheets made fast. Now came the most difficult part: picking their way down the narrow channel on a moonless night. With Nathaniel at the wheel, Eliot and Will stood in the bow, each holding a lantern to one side to illuminate shoal water. They called directions over their shoulders. “Port … Port a little more … Steady … Starboard now … Steady …” Two or three times came the sickening sound of the keel scraping bottom. Once, responding sluggishly to the helm, the schooner nosed into an oyster bar and became stuck. Poling with the tender’s oars and the broken boathook did no good; they were too short to reach the hard bottom under the ooze. The spare anchor was taken out in the tender and dropped in deep water, and Double Eagle was kedged off. Her crew felt the joy, held in suspension, of escaped prisoners not yet certain of success.

An hour later, as the tide neared full flood, she had two full fathoms under her and was working against the current in the Beaufort River, which could be distinguished from the shoreline only by the occasional glimmer of reflected stars. The boys heard fish jumping but could not see them. Something big splashed near the woods on the starboard side; it sounded as if a log had been tossed into the river. Will and Eliot, keeping their places in the bow to light up channel buoys, swung their lanterns out to the right side, and saw what looked like a pair of burning coals bobbing on the surface two yards from the boat. In a moment, they recognized the eyes of an alligator, ten feet long and a yard across the back.

“First one I’ve ever seen outside a zoo,” Eliot whispered, as if to hide his presence from the reptile.

“I hate it down here,” Will moaned. “Gators and crazy fortunetelling hillbillies and enough mosquitos to suck the blood out of a million horses.”

A little after midnight, the tide having turned to give them a push downriver, they caught the lights of Beaufort dead ahead.