Black Watch’s lead was halved and halved again. If Double Eagle wasn’t going as fast as she had on the mad run back from Halifax last year, she was damn close. Eight knots and some. The two vessels, one green as the Maine forests, the other black as a cormorant’s wing, lunged across the bay while scudding clouds caused the sun to flicker and flash, like a warship’s signal lamp, but without the regularity. Eliot, trimming the sails with Drew—Drew pluckily trying to do his part—began to feel that both crews had become mere observers; it was as though the boats were racing themselves. Double Eagle was owned by a man who loved triumph and detested defeat, and that love, that loathing, were in her now, impregnated into her very wood, mystical as that might sound. She had heart, she had sand, and she had speed on this point of sail, and all those qualities, as much as the lumpy seas that made the yawl slew back and forth, appeared to wear Black Watch down, to sap her spirit.

Less than fifty yards separated Double Eagle’s bow from the yawl’s stern, when they entered the wide mouth of the Fox Islands Thorofare. It was a question of tactics now. One of Black Watch’s crew stood at her stern rail, watching to see if Nat would make the expected move—cross the yawl’s wake and then pass her on her weather side, blanketing her wind. Black Watch would then be slowed down, and so lose a lot of ground, while her opponent, bearing off, would streak away. The danger to Double Eagle would be this: To slip across the yawl’s stern, she would have to point closer to the wind, losing her advantage in speed for a critical thirty seconds or so.

“All right, brothers, we’ll give it a try, but be ready to fall off if I give the say-so.”

Helm up, Double Eagle pointed higher, then came close hauled, her fleetness going right out of her, like a runner who’s lost his breath. Eliot and Drew, leaning against the fierce pressure on the sheets, pulled the sails in, while Nat, crouched behind the wheel, watched the yawl, the seas, and the streaming telltales with a naturalist’s attentiveness. Quickly, Black Watch pointed up to block the passing maneuver; to complete it, Double Eagle would have to sail even farther to windward, but she could not. Any more and she would be pinching, which would slow her down further.

“Just what I figured they’d do,” said Nat. “We’ll bear off and take ’em on the other side. Ease sheets and get ready to set the staysail.”

He spun the helm down, and the schooner lunged forward, so near to dead astern of Black Watch, she must have looked under tow from a distance. Bearing off some more, she put a few more yards in her pocket, and a few more, until her bow was almost abeam of the yawl’s mainmast, and there was so little space between the two hulls that if Black Watch’s main boom were to suddenly swing to leeward, it would sweep Double Eagle’s decks like a sickle.