5

WHAT IF they’re not going to North Haven? Suppose they’re bound for Camden, Portland, Madagascar? Do we race them anyway and forget North Haven? Where’s the finish, and who’s to say who wins? Scampering over the decks, wet and cool beneath his bare feet, Eliot concluded that the race was a figment of his older brother’s imagination, or, better yet, a product of that busy factory, his overly competitive nature. Nat was never satisfied unless he was in a match, a scrimmage, a scuffle, a race, and if one didn’t exist, he would invent one. That fellow on the yawl had only been taunting them, not challenging them. But in the interests of keeping a happy ship, Eliot submitted himself to Nat’s fantasy. With Drew, he wrestled the topsails out of the bags and ran them up.

“Picked up a knot!” shouted Nat. “Did you feel her? Like a horse kicked into a trot. They’ll be eating our wake, and right quick!”

If Lockwood and Drew looked most like the old man on the outside, Nat was his twin on the inside. How many times, on the summer cruises, had Father spotted another yacht away off somewhere and gone straight toward her, promising to give her a run for her money, show her and her crew how a real vessel manned by real sailors could crack on? Had to win. Had to find something to run against, or be up against, and win. Made his living that way once. When the lookouts on Key West rang bells and shouted from towers, “Wreck ashore!” it was a footrace of skippers and crews to their vessels, and then a sailing race, a regular right smart regatta, Dad had said, sloops and schooners dueling, in barbarous seas and winds, to be first to the wreck and claim rights as salvage master, and the prize not a silver cup to sit gleaming in a trophy case but ten or twenty or thirty thousand dollars in saved cargo and whatever treasure awaited you in heaven for saving lives. Must have gotten into his blood, Eliot reckoned, so he just couldn’t stand fair winds and quiet seas, in any sense of the word; hell, he probably had a fine time, facing down the strikers in the Black Island pits two years ago, just him and his manager, the big Swede called Pedersen, against more than one hundred angry men armed with clubs and implements of their trade.

“Hey! I’ll do that,” he said to Drew, who had suddenly leapt onto the bowsprit.

Straddling it, and it pitching in the chop, Drew inched forward to unfurl the jib topsail.

“L’il brother, you don’t have to prove anything to him.”

“You can give me a hand, if you want.”