They went on, fording a broad stretch of deeper water between the key and the mainland. Drew was up to his chest in a few places, and once, stepping into a white sand hole, over his head. Pale brown sharks no more than a foot long finned lazily over meadows of turtle grass; small stingrays glided by, trailing whiplike tails from their black, pie-plate bodies.

Drew offered to spell Nathaniel, but he refused, vowing to carry the barrel all the way to Cárdenas. It was the beginning of a self-imposed penance. If life was to offer him a chance to redeem himself, he reasoned, then he had to prove himself worthy of it, purifying himself through suffering and sacrifice. He welcomed the chafe and burn of the hemp straps, the strain that twenty pounds of water and wood put on his back. He exulted in the heat, his thirst, and in the pinch of the limestone gravel on his bare soles. As far as he was concerned, he could not suffer enough.

Five hours after starting out, they set foot on a beach no wider than a sidewalk and littered with storm wrack: coconuts, broken lobster traps, coils of pot warp, driftwood, a tree trunk borne from some distant place. Behind the beach lay more flattened mangroves and fallen casaurinas, jumbled like the slash at a logging site. A few palms remained upright, leaning at crazy angles, some with all but one or two fronds stripped off. The boys rested and drank again and ate cold salt pork out of a tin with their fingers before setting off, single file. Sometimes the beach constricted to the width of a footpath; frequently, it gave out altogether, forcing them to struggle over the mazed hoops of mangrove roots or to wade the waist-deep channels, dredged along the shore by tidal currents. They swam the mouth of a small river, Nathaniel pushing the scuttlebutt out ahead of him, Will gasping from pain, Drew taking the shotgun and the tramp’s bundle from Eliot, who needed his good hand to paddle with. They reached the head of the bay at nightfall, flopped down on the sand, and closed their eyes, but the mosquitos, swarming out of the mangrove swamps, would not allow them to sleep, so they went on, their way lit by a quarter moon. Finally, around midnight, exhaustion overcame them and they slept.

They were off again with the dawn, trying to make as much distance as possible in the relative cool. Weeks on a small ship had softened their legs. Their muscles were stiff and refused to move quickly. Will, noting that the shoreline now headed due west, said that if he had read the chart correctly, Cárdenas could not be more than ten miles off. Two hours, and perhaps that many miles later, they drank the last of their water, and Nathaniel dropped the scuttlebutt, that portion of his penance done. Still seeing no sign of civilization, not a boat, farm, or village, they sat down and indulged in dreadful speculations. Maybe they had plotted their position incorrectly and were not on Cárdenas Bay, but on some other utterly deserted stretch of the Cuban coast. They dropped off to sleep, clubbed into unconsciousness by weariness and the heat. Their dreams now were of clear northern streams and sweet springs bubbling in shady New England glades.