“No, you can’t, because you don’t have to,” he said, turning aside a little, as though addressing the bulkhead upon which the barometer and chronometer shone in their brass housings. “You didn’t see him, the way his eyes almost popped out of his head and his mouth opened like he was going to scream, but he never got the chance even to do that. And then that big tail, going back and forth and down and down, through the clouds of his blood. Uh-uh. You didn’t see that, but I reckon I will, if I live to be a hundred.”

There was nothing to say to this. Will lit a second cigarette off the butt of the first, let the smoke drift out of his mouth, and inhaled it through his nostrils.

“All right, then here’s what we’ll do,” he said. “Lash down and batten down. Sea anchor at hand. Test the pumps to make sure they’re drawing. That should take an hour at the longest. Then we start toward the fort with a triple-reefed main and foresail and stays’l. We’ll need the stays’l for balance.” He spoke with authority, the cigarette jigging between his fleshy lips. “If our timing is right, we’ll be near the harbor toward daybreak. Then we’ll have enough light to sneak in through those tight channels.”

“A plan,” said Eliot. “The best thing about a plan is to have one.”

And it was a good plan (Sybil comments, aside). Men who had earned their salt would have approved it for its caution and sagacity, qualities seldom found in twenty-year-olds, even those with Yale educations. Will figured they would be sitting snugly behind Fort Jefferson’s eight-foot-thick walls by the time the outer winds struck. That was the one flaw in his plan, a forgivable one, since in those days before marine radio or even wireless telegraphy, before aerial reconnaissance and satellite telemetry, there was no way for him or anyone to know that the hurricane, coiled as tightly as a serpent prepared to strike, was flying eastward at the speed of the fastest liner then on the ocean—much faster than Will had counted on.

The younger boys checked and secured things below—locker doors, portholes, steering cables. Above decks, Nathaniel and Will inspected shrouds, stays and the anchor cable, bolted hatches to the skylight. The cloud wall had risen, resembling an anthracite cliff emerging from the sea. Will, feeling the first touch of west wind on his face, worked with urgency, but Nathaniel moved about sluggishly. None of Will’s pleas to “hurry up, give a hand here, get the lead out” had the least effect on him. They were like the consoling platitudes offered to someone suffering from an inconsolable loss.