“Without a smoke, Eliot, I shall become unpleasant company. Far as the storm goes, the eye will pass over us after the eye wall, assuming we’re not on the bottom by then, and it’ll get real calm for a while. How long depends on how big the eye is. I’ll bet my last pair of dry socks that this one won’t be very big, twenty miles across at most. The stronger the storm, the smaller the eye. Then, oh, maybe half an hour later, we’ll get hit by the back side. As a rule, the back side of a hurricane isn’t as nasty as the front.”

“Learn all this from that book of yours?” Eliot grimaced as the floor slammed under him and pain darted through his injured hand.

“My skipper in the Bermuda race gave us a primer on these daisies, just in case we ran into one during the race.” He lighted one of the remaining cigarettes, rationing himself to two deep drags before he snubbed it out and returned it to the pack. “We’ll be busy lads when we’re in the eye. That’s when we’ll haul up both anchors, if we can, or cut the cables if we can’t, then make sail and claw away from Loggerhead, to be ready for the winds from the back side.”

“Loggerhead’s about half a mile off,” Drew interjected. “We saw the lighthouse, Nat and me, a couple of minutes ago.”

“Proves my point,” Will said. “Half a mile is too narrow a margin.”

“All this will be just bullshit if we lose the anchors altogether,” Nathaniel said, wearily. He was beginning to find the strategizing tiresome, and possibly pointless, as well. It allowed you to think that you had some control over what was going to happen to you, when you probably had none whatever. “And we might lose ’em, y’know,” he added. “The cables could chafe right through in the chocks, or if there’s enough strain on ’em, they could part, just like the staysail sheet did.”

“So, Capitano Furioso Junior, what do we do then?” asked Eliot.

Nathaniel said nothing. Die, he thought, overcome by a fatalism foreign to his nature. Reckon we’ll die.

Will, on all fours, his head bobbing with the motions of the boat, rummaged among the charts papering the floor.