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ashore to steal cargoes, strip the hulls, and murder the crews. Far back, most of the families had washed up from wrecks, and it would be the last thing on anybody's mind to cause a ship to ground. An unthinkable thing.
    That treacherous story began a hundred or more years ago when it was claimed that land pirates walked ponies, with ship's running lights tied to their necks, along Jockey Ridge, to north, which was the highest sand dune on the Atlantic coast. It was claimed that if a ship was going south, the pony light would be green; north, the light would be red. The ponies made the lights bob, so the ship at sea would figure another ship was in closer and running safe. She'd haul over and pile up on the beach.
    It was a terrible lie, Rachel knew.
    Even though there was a place below Jockey Ridge named Nag's Head, which supposedly got its tide from the lantern-toting ponies, not a word of truth was in that land pirate story. The men would double over in laughter when they heard it. Anyone in their right mind who wanted to lure a ship ashore would put the pony on the beach, not inland on Jockey Ridge.
    The only time there was murder and some theft was long ago with a Spanish ship. But the vessel wasn't called ashore and the Spaniards had asked for it They got butchered for their impudence.
    There was also the
Flambeau
that wrecked off Chicamacomico, which everyone called Chicky, in 1861. It carried a cargo of top hats. Now, who wouldn't steal a top hat, especially if it threatened to float away? Anyhow, everyone on the Banks had a top hat from the
Flambeau.
Even John O'Neal had one, Rachel remembered, and by no means was he a thief.
    Now and then, there was a little purloining of wrecked cargo when whiskey was involved. Some of it mysteriously just never reached
vendue,
which was what the wreck auction was called. But, laughed the Bankers, and Rachel agreed, if everyone in the United States had done no worse than steal top hats and some whiskey, moderately, the country was in good shape.
    The people, like Rachel and Ben, were mostly Methodist and God-fearing. In their veins, one family to another, was some British, some Swedish; Irish, Portuguese, German, not to mention Arab. Most of it, to be certain, was castaway blood.
    Until he died, Mr. Joshua Dailey was schoolmaster down at Hatteras village and Trent. He had floundered ashore in 1837. In the bad winter of 1856, when the sounds froze up, Mr. Herbert Oden had come bobbing ashore in a pork barrel off the
Mary Varney,
as naked as the moment he was born. Ben's own paternal grandfather, Captain Issac O'Neal, from Plymouth, England, had floated in on a spar, clutching his drowned first mate by the hair of his head.
    Rachel knew it all because she'd been born down near Hatteras, daughter of another castaway.
    The first people that came to the Banks, after the Indians were pushed out, planned to run cattle and did so for a while. There were still some wild cattle and half-wild sheep around. Soon, though, it was more profitable to be wreckers. In fact, more than a hundred years ago a wreck commissioner was established just to supervise all the hulls that crashed. But the menfolk, just to survive, had to be a little of everything from farmer to boatbuilder, fisherman, and hunter. The women did the rest. As a bride, Rachel had washed, carded, and spun her own wool.
    True, also, was that many of the houses were built completely of ship's timbers and lumber from the sea; furniture from ship's cabins. If a cargo of red paint washed ashore, houses would be red for years; if puncheons of Jamaica molasses came in, there'd be sweetening for com cakes for a long time to come.
    The sea giveth and the sea taketh away, as John and Guthrie were good examples,
Rachel thought.
    The Outer Banks hadn't been much to look at in the last fifty years, especially since the damn Yankees cut down most of the trees on the sound side in the Civil War. The blowing sand threatened to shove everybody into