In his drawers, slapping his face, he followed Eliot outside, where the day’s new light colored the ratty sails of the yawl, now gone a little way past Double Eagle. She had pointed up and was slipping between the schooner and the sponge fleet toward the Simonton Street docks.

De blackbird sang and de crow went caw …
Shallow, shallow brown!
Let’s set dis sail by half past four …
Shallow, shallow brown!

“Remember from when we were kids?” asked Eliot. “Lockwood used to sing that song when he was home, and one time I asked him where he’d learned it and he said it was from that old Bahamaian Negro who used to work for Dad. Well, there’s six Negroes on that sponger, and one of ’em has got to be Lowe.”

We’re bound away for Nassau town …
Shallow, shallow brown!
So run aloft, den come on down …
Shallow, shallow brown!

His brown feet bare, wearing denim overalls shrunk two inches too short even for his short legs, Artemis Lowe slouched against the tiller of the Euphrenia Mae and tipped back his palm-thatch hat, lifting the shadow from his eyes, the left hazel, the right a sightless pearl, the whites of both red-rimmed. He was a strangely built man, no taller than five feet eight, and two-thirds of that was torso, the shirtless torso under the overall’s bib like a stout barrel casking the lungs of the diver he had once been.

“Lord God Jehovah! I ain’t seen Cop’in Cy in twenny year,” he said, in a booming voice. “You’re de Cop’in’s boys, you say? You ain’t joshin’ me, are you?”

Standing on the dock, Nathaniel said, “No, sir. Why would we?” Beside him were Eliot and Drew; beside them, a crewman was taking wicker baskets full of sponges passed to him by two more men on the deck of Lowe’s boat. Two others were inside the deckhouse, tossing the sponges from out of the hold.

“Well, some folks like to josh,” said Lowe. “Make der lives interestin’.” He turned his broad head, resting almost neckless on his shoulders, to look at Double Eagle. “And you come down all de way from Maine on dot boat? Lotta boat for a short trip, but not much for a trip like dot. Yeah, you ain’t joshin’. You Cop’in Cy’s blood, all right. Well, now, Jem me shake your hands.”

Stretching his squat legs with some effort, he stepped off and gave them each a handshake, his smile baring crooked teeth, the bottom tooth in the middle capped in gold.

“We’d been asking around town for you,” Nathaniel told him. “Yesterday, we ran into a fella who said he knew you and that you were still around.”

“And which fella dot?”

“Don’t know his name. Tall, skinny …”

“White fella or black?”

“Black.”