Will sucked in smoke and exhaled it through his nostrils.

“I can break wind with the best, and I can prove it.”

“Don’t do dot!” Artemis threw back his head and laughed again; a laugh that started in his knees and rose through him, gathering power. He took another swig of rum, his good eye, deeply furrowed at the corner from years of squinting into harsh sunlight, wandering up and down the mainmast, over to the wheel and the binnacle in front of it. “Oh, dis one pretty little ship, it is. You can see Cop’in Cy’s hand in it, yeah, you sure can.” Rising to stand at the helm, work-thickened fingers grasping the spokes, his face expressing something like love. “How does she ride, boys? Your papa used to say of Main Chance dot the rode to make de seagulls weep for shame.”

“Says the same about this one,” Eliot told him. “She’s got sand, too. She weathered a fifty-knot gale in the Carolinas when we were coming down.”

“Would of figured your papa to make sure she got dot quality. Main Chance had it, too. Back in de wreckin’ days, we used to storm ride in her. Storm-ridin’, dass de riskiest thing a wrecker can do, dass when you stay out when every other cop’in with an ounce of sense is lookin’ for some place to put in. You wait for some ship to hit de rocks and shoals. Dass about what we were doin’ when de Annisquam run aground on de Tortugas reefs. Seventy mile from where we now sittin’.” Motioning at the orange and scarlet horizon, above which filaments of cirrus had woven themselves into a crisscross pattern as symmetrical as the checks in a checkered shirt. “On dot day it was hot, too hot for de springtime, hot like it is today, and de glass fallin’ some, but the thing your papa notice was de wind,” he said, and sat down again between Will and Nathaniel. “Oh, dot mon could read de weather like he read de book de prophet Isaiah wrote.

“What de wind is supposed to do dot time of year is blow southeast, den south, den southwest, and go right round de clock and come north, givin’ you a little norther for a day, maybe two, before it finish clockin’ and come southeast again. But on dot day, tenth of March, 1879, de wind stopped after it go southwest. Stopped dead, den it commenced to blow, real, real light—not five knots—but stead-day out de west. A backin’ wind, boys, and dot mean trouble. In dese waters here, when de wind backin’ in de springtime, you most can count on a westerly gale comin’ out de Gulf of Mexico, and dem springtime westerlies, hooo-hee, dey can blow like a hurricane.