“Ready!” Nathaniel hollered. “We’ll need the extra drive of that staysail in half a second!”

The boats were now abeam of each other, plunging, rearing neck and neck, snorting bow spray. Black Watch’s sails seemed to rise off the port side like a great cliff of canvas, a cliff that left Double Eagle starved for wind—Eliot could almost feel her lungs sucking as she began to lose some ground, a foot or two at a time. Abeam, then abaft abeam, and then Nat fairly screamed:

“Now! Heave! Heave away!”

Eliot and Drew heaved on the staysail halyards, hand over hand. As they were trimming, Drew vomited in two or three noisy spasms, let the line go, and fell on his ass. Eliot hopped backward to take up the sudden slack, slipped in the mixture of vomit and seawater, and fell beside his younger brother, the sheet flying from his hands to flail the air like a huge, mad, writhing serpent, while the sail slapped aloft.

Jumping to his feet, Eliot snatched the line and hauled—and felt nothing move. He looked up.

“It’s fouled, Nat! Fouled!”

“Well, by Christ, unfoul it! We’ll be looking at their arse again in a second and it’s a sight I’m sick of seeing!”

God Almighty, he even sounded like the old man now. Eliot ran to leeward and jerked the sheet, ran to weather, gave it another jerk, freeing it, but lost his footing on the wet deck a second time, banged his head against the rail hard enough to see a bright flash. An odd question shot through his mind as he sat: How many times did Jesus fall carrying his cross? And though he could not see them, he imagined that Black Watch’s crew were laughing at the circus on Double Eagle’s deck, yes, laughing, jeering, as the Pharisees, or Sadducees, or whoever had laughed and jeered Our Lord as he carried his cross. Eliot got up, shook his fist at the yawl, and hollered, “I am the risen Christ!” Then, his mind clearing, he grabbed the line again and set the sail.

Looking forward, he fully expected to see the yawl making for the horizon, but saw that she wasn’t but fifteen, twenty yards ahead. Yards that Double Eagle made up swiftly, the big fisherman’s staysail powering her on as Nat laid the schooner off fifteen degrees to get up enough steam to help drive her through the yawl’s wind shadow. She was abeam Black Watch for the second time, slowing as she passed through the yawl’s lee, but still driving, all grit and perseverance now, and if the rival crew had been laughing at the carnival of mishaps, they weren’t laughing now. The schooner’s bowsprit stabbed past the yawl.

“We’ve got ’em! We’ve got ’em now!” Every fiber in Nat’s body was taut as the rigging, his face glowed with an exultation that was, well, damn near religious. Then, with a quick look at his opponent, he let out a yell.