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people, over the years, to near speechlessness with pleasure. Okay, I said to the broker, tell him he can have the radio, but I get to keep the oil paintings. I felt as though I were offering him the Sistine Chapel without the ceiling. The broker warned that the buyer was a man of mercurial temper and mountain-hard resolution. I replied that he could have God or Mammon, but not both. Fifteen minutes later the telephone rang, and I cannot remember a moment of greater dismay. “He says sure you can have the paintings. He was going to take ’em out anyway, give them away, and put up some nice brass lamps.”
    That was not quite the end of the transaction. When the boatyard gave over the bill to my young captain, he was appalled. He figured it to be about three times the justified amount. “They know you have to turn over the boat by the first of August to the new buyer unencumbered, so they’re just holding you up.” For instance, he said, there was an item: eight hundred dollars to varnish and paint the whaler. “It couldn’t have come to more than two hundred in time and materials.” What to do?
    I called my friend back at 8 P.M . and, fortunately, found him in a plucky mood. Would he arrange, with two or three companions, to slip aboard sometime between midnight and dawn and sail the boat out of Savannah Harbor, northeast thirty miles to Hilton Head in South Carolina, removed from Georgia jurisdiction?
    “Then we can quarrel over the bill at our leisure, without jeopardizing the deal.”
    My friend was indignant enough to take to the idea (“even though I’ve got to live here in Savannah after
Cyrano
is gone”). He rounded up three spirited friends and, armed with a bottle or two of liquor to guard against the terrible early morning cold in Georgia in midsummer, they tiptoed on board, loosed the lines, and floated out with the tide before turning on the engine. By dawn they were ten miles from the most irate boatyard owner-pirate on the East Coast. I worried when, by noon, I hadn’t heard from them. I called the Coast Guard, and learned they were safe: they had simply run aground coming into Hilton Head. I served notice on the boatyard owner that I was willing to go to arbitration, but that I would subtract from any final figure the cost of my legal defense. We settled. At about one half. At that, he took me for two or three thousand.
    This wasn’t the very first time I’d had to deal stealthily with boatyards. Three summers earlier, the Westerbeke engine in my yawl,
Suzy Wong
, committed its ritual annual suicide. (I’d had six new or totally rebuilt Westerbekes in fourteen years.) The local yard quoted a figure to rebuild her, and Reg suggested we get a competitive bid from a yard in Long Island, just by La Guardia Airport. Danny got someone to tow the boat over, and exactly one week later I was advised by Mrs. Flynn a) that the engine had been rebuilt; b) that the bill was for $2,100 (approximately the price quoted by my home yard, to which I’d have preferred to give the business); and c) that the money would have to be paid in cash before I could reclaim the boat.
    I react adversely to ultimatums. The boatyard owner, without any commission whatever (he had been asked, merely, for an estimate) had undertaken to do the work, setting his own price. That was on Friday. On Sunday morning Danny, Christopher, and I drove to the yard, parked at a safe distance, and having established that there was no watchman on duty, vaulted the fence and approached
Suzy Wong. My
boat was secured to two huge eye-bolts on the slip by a chain led around the mainmast and the after-mast and padlocked in place.
    We went to City Island and there made arrangements to charter a whaler that would take us over water to the boatyard at three that afternoon. We arrived with a basket of tools, and instructed the skipper in which direction to head. We tried to look innocent, but we correctly surmised, later, that it was he who, on getting