Hostages to Fortune by William Humphrey

bigger than an outhouse were few.
    It was fitting that he leave his gun here. This was its home. It was an under-and-over double-barrel made expressly for Tony’s father by a famed London gunsmith. The finely checkered walnut stock had the figure and the finish of polished agate, the engraving of the metal displayed its breeding by its lack of display. The gun that had fit the father did not fit the son, so Tony said. It pained Tony to shoot a better gun than his friend. He offered this one to him.
    â€œBut, Tony,” he had said, “I’d be afraid to shoot a gun that fine.”
    â€œOh, just be careful where you point it,” said Tony.
    Day would be dawning, the light straining through the tent of clouds stretched low overhead. The wind out of the north would be laden with mist. In hip boots and down-filled jackets spotted in camouflage, carrying guns, hamper, shellboxes, they went down the path that parted the dense growth of periwinkle. Nero, the black Labrador retriever, bounded and frisked ahead of them.
    At this time of year the boathouse sheltered the Thayer clan’s entire collection of vessels. Boats were handed down in that family the way clothes were in others. Resting on saw-horses, suspended from beams, were sailboats for every age and level of competence, punts, skiffs, sculls, even a kayak, and there were the iceboats. In addition to those accumulated by his ancestors, Tony owned several that he had been given as the popularity of the sport among the river families, once great, declined. Stripped down to nothing more than a pair of crossed sticks, a mast with a set sail, a tiller and two shallow trays, one for the driver and one for a single passenger to lie prone upon, the whole thing poised on runners, an iceboat had but one purpose: speed. In a high wind one of those things could attain a hundred and thirty miles an hour; that, held by Tony, was, in fact, the current record. He had them in sizes from eighteen to thirty feet long. Trim, lean, even gaunt, and so strictly limited in function they brought to mind his Anthony’s hawks, the little merlin up to the big goshawk, which, even at rest on their perches, seemed instinct with swiftness, with the same inherent capacity of an inert cartridge to explode into flight. After seeing it but before trying it himself he had urged his friend to give up iceboating as too dangerous. A man with a wife and child owed it to them to forgo some forms of fun. To this Tony replied that he had heard of a woman’s being thrown overboard once and fracturing an arm but that it was a sport for which no fatality was recorded. And after experiencing it, bounding over the frozen waves with a noise like a galloping herd, flying sometimes a foot above the glazed and dazzling surface and feeling in his face the sting of the icy spray thrown back by the runners, he himself had surrendered to its appeal.
    But today it was onto the water, not onto the ice. Their punt, double-pointed for getting out of dead-end windings too narrow to turn around in, was waiting on the ramp. They stuffed two canvas bags with decoys and hauled the boat down to the water. Nero leaped aboard and seated himself in the bow: a fitting figurehead. He took his place amidship and Tony launched them. The motor responded to the pull of the cord, the bow rose high out of water and they planed across the cove headed west. The rising tide was near the full. To pass under the railroad trestle they had to duck their heads.
    Inside the cove, separated from the river by the railway embankment, the water had been smooth but on the river the wind funneling down the valley raised waves and the ride was rough as the boat crested and bottomed, crested and bottomed. A southbound freight train, its length lost in the mist, overtook them and clanked alongside with a noise like the links of a chain being dragged over the ties.
    The train’s caboose had disappeared into the mist when they turned from