The wind dropped, as it usually did late on summer afternoons. Under her cloud of canvas, Double Eagle pranced into North Haven harbor. The lowering sun burnished the waters, but the light did not seem to be shining on them but through them from below, as if gold were being minted down there, in some undersea alchemist’s forge. Around here, thought Nathaniel, even the water looked like a million bucks. Vinalhaven, so near that you could row to it across the thorofare, was an island of quarrymen, lobstermen, fishermen, and schoonermen, a place so rough and salty one breath of its air could make your nostrils rust; on North Haven, elegant gardens bloomed around rambling houses (their owners called them “cottages,” with a certain snooty understatement) where Philadelphia lawyers, New York industrialists, and Boston textile merchants parked wives and children for the summer, while they stayed in the cities, making the money that bought the houses and the yachts, great and small, crowding the harbor whose surface now glowed with that golden fire.

The Braithwaites belonged in North Haven’s social circle (closer to the rim than to the center; they were barons, as opposed to dukes and princes, of America’s mercantile aristocracy), but Nathaniel liked to think of himself as an outsider—rougher and tougher, in spirit more one with the people of Vinalhaven, he who had breathed quarry dust and grown calluses last year. Flush with victory, he put on a show for the piazza-chair loafers of this prosperous port. Weaving between the anchored vessels, he bore straight for the Camden steam ferry disembarking passengers at the terminal, just to scare them a little bit, wheeled about, and strutted past the casino, which wasn’t a gambling den but a yacht club with a sober face of brown shingles and white-trimmed windows. He waved at a pretty girl standing on the wharf and then headed straight for Black Watch, which was coming in to anchor. Having failed to get a rise out of the ferry passengers, he hoped to scare Will and his crew. Some twenty yards short of the yawl, he told Eliot and Drew to get set to drop the anchor; then he spun the wheel and rounded up, Double Eagle pirouetting before she stopped dead. Eliot paid out the anchor rode, gave it a tug to make sure it was fast, then snubbed it off to the samson post.

From the yawl, only fifty feet away, came a slow applause. Will stood leaning against the mizzenmast, his hat off, and his hair the color of a hayrick.

“My compliments to your father,” he hailed. “ ‘Some right gud skipperin’ thar’, as these down-east peasants would say. The losers invite you and yours aboard for a drink. There’s some Cuban rum for your old man, sodee pops for the chill-runs. Whenever you’re ready.”

Nathaniel tossed him a salute and murmured, “Wait till he finds out.”