“Uh, no speakee hispanyoly,” Nathaniel had replied, before Will stepped in and determined that the man was just off the Havana ferryboat and was asking for directions to the Cortez cigar factory. He told him how to find it, the Cuban appearing a little confused to have gotten the response he did from Nathaniel while receiving an answer in his native tongue from blond, blue-eyed Will.

The Lower Keys Sponge and Fruit Company was at the foot of Simonton. Pyramids of sponges, giving off a pungent smell, had been set out to dry in the shade of a covered dock. A long, shoal-draft sloop was tied up to the dock, and a dozen more vessels like it, each with a kite tail of skiffs trailing from its stern, lay at anchor on the blinding harbor.

“How did the old man and Lockwood stand it here for nearly fifteen years?”

Eliot took off his cap and toweled his hair with a bandanna as they approached a board-and-batten shack at the foot of the dock. Key West looked like a Yankee town, with its wooden cottages and clapboard mansions graced by verandas and gingerbread, but it felt like a settlement in hell, its heat not a meterological condition but an affliction. The air never filled the lungs. Sometimes, desperate for relief, Eliot would dive off the schooner naked as a newborn, but the water did not refresh; it felt like the atmosphere, only in denser form. He had begun to yearn for home, to dream about it—the bracing slap of New England breezes, the cold green bays of Maine and Gloucester. But after what Nat had learned today, from a rum-reeking old Negro in the neighborhood called Africa Town, it looked like they were going to remain on this broiling rock for a while longer.

Nathaniel knocked at the shack’s door, which was opened by a man with a long, narrow head and, incredibly, a bow tie cinched tight to a starched collar.

“Would you be Mr. Pinder?” asked Nathaniel.

“I’d be Mr. Carey”—motioning at an unpainted frame building across a lot where horse carts were parked, the nags’ head drooping in the midday blaze. “Mr. Pinder’s in the office.”

“Thanks very much,” Nathaniel said, turning.

“Won’t get to see him for a spell. He’s meetin’ with some buyers right now. Maybe I can help you?”

“We heard you’re hiring, and we’re looking for work.”

Hungry, all but literally hungry for work. Will was down to his last seven dollars, and the Braithwaites’ treasury had shrunk to five.

“I’m the man you want to see,” said Carey, gesturing to them to come inside, where a paddle fan twirled lazily overhead. He sat down at a rolltop desk and pulled a sheet of ruled paper from one of the slots. “Put down your names and where you’re stayin’. You can write, I reckon?”