He was gratified to find nothing amiss.

The boat looked different from anything Lasker had seen before, although he couldn’t have said why. It might have been, that first morning, the shifting texture of the light beneath dark passing clouds. It might have been the proportion of bow to stern, of tiller to mainmast. It might have been some subtle set of numbers in the geometry of the craft.

Will glanced toward the east, in the general direction of the Red River of the North. “It’s a long way to the water,” he said.

“It looks in good shape.” Ray Hammond, who owned the land to the east, along Route 11, scratched his head. “It looks like you could run her out tomorrow.” He touched the sails with the tip of his boot. “These might need a little soap and water, though.”

A car pulled into the driveway. Ed Patterson and his wife and five kids climbed out. Ed ran the Handy Hardware in Walhalla. He inspected the boat, shaking his head, and his wife looked at Lasker as if Lasker had family secrets that had just been exposed. The kids began chasing one another around the driveway.

Kausner had gone back to his station wagon. He returned with a tape measure. He made marks in the soil at stem and stern and measured it off. “Forty-seven feet, five inches,” he announced.

Had anyone been there with a nautical background, that person would have recognized the craft as a ketch. It had a full keel, a wide beam (just under seventeen feet), a full underbody, and a graceful turn to the bilge. Waist-high bulwarks surrounded the deck, tapering toward the bow. There were two steering stations, one in the cockpit and a secondary one inside the pilothouse, just aft of the beam. Air scoops opened out to port and starboard.

The only visible damage to the craft was a broken propeller shaft.

They took down the sails, washed them, and hung them in the basement to dry. Lasker removed the mooring cables, cleaned them, and put them in the barn.

It took two more days to clear out the belowdecks area.

There were two cabins, a galley, and a washroom.

The cabins were unremarkable. There was a table in each, a scattering of chairs, and two bunks. Several empty cabinets were built into rough-hewn bulkheads.

The galley had a refrigerator, a bank of devices that might have been microwave ovens, and liquid dispensers. But symbols on the microwaves and in the refrigerator were unfamiliar. The washroom had a shower and a washbasin and the oddest-looking toilet Lasker had ever seen: It was low and squat and had neither a seat nor a cover. Again, they found writing no one could identify.

“It’s spooky,” he told Ginny that first evening after they’d looked belowdecks. The small crowd had broken up after a while and drifted away, leaving Lasker wondering how the boat had got into the hillside. What had Will said? It’s a long way to the water.

After dinner he looked at the yacht through the windows over the kitchen sink. It gleamed in the moonlight.

“You okay?” Ginny asked.

“I wish I knew what it was. Where it came from.”

She offered him a piece of lemon meringue pie. “Must have been your father,” she said. “Who else could it have been?”

Later, while she read, he put on his jacket and went out.

Fort Moxie lent itself to timelessness. There were no major renovation projects, no vast cultural shifts imposed by changing technology, no influxes of strangers, no social engineering. The town and the broad prairie in which it rested were caught in a kind of time warp. It was a place where Harry Truman was still president. Where people still liked one another, and crime was virtually unknown. The last felony in Fort Moxie had occurred in 1934, when Bugsy Moran shot his way through the border station.

In all, it was a stable place to live, a good place to rear kids.

The plain stretched out forever. It had been the basin for Lake Agassiz, the inland sea whose surface area had been broader than that of the modern Great Lakes combined.

Agassiz.

Long gone now. He looked west toward the ridge at its old coastline. Not much more than a wrinkle in the plain. An inglorious end. He’d flown over it many times, pointing it out to his boys. He wanted them to love the place as he did.

Ben at Ten, KLMR-TV, Grand Forks, 10:26 P.M., October 18.

Markey: We’ve got a strange story out of Fort Moxie tonight, Julie. They’ve found a yacht in a wheat patch.

Hawkins: (Smiling) A yacht in a wheat patch?

(Cut to long shot of Fort Moxie; pan out across prairie, close in on windbreak and farm buildings)

Markey: Anybody out there misplace a sailboat? There’s a farmer up near the border who’s scratching his head tonight. Carole Jensen reports.

(Cut to long shot of yacht and spectators; closeup on Jensen)

Jensen: Ben, this is Carole Jensen at the Tom Lasker farm in Cavalier County.

(Cut to Lasker)

That is a beautiful yacht, Mr. Lasker. Are you really trying to tell us somebody buried this on your farm?

Lasker: Yes, I am, Carole. Right up there. (Pointing)That’s land I’d held out through the last planting season. We’re going to plant wheat in the spring. But I needed a system that would pump water uphill. So we were burying pipes, and there it was.

Jensen: The yacht?

Lasker: Yes.

(Angle shot to emphasize the dimensions of the boat)

Jensen: Was it all buried? Or just part of it?

Lasker: All of it.

Jensen: Mr. Lasker, who would leave something like this on your land?

Lasker: Carole, I haven’t a clue.

Jensen: (Turning full face) Well, there you have it, Ben. I wonder what else is lying around the Red River Valley. We might want to pay a little more attention when we put the begonias in next spring. This is Carole Jensen reporting from the Lasker farm near Fort Moxie.

(Stage shot)

Markey: And that’s a wrap for your news team. Good night, Julie.

Hawkins: Good night, Ben. (Full face to camera) Good night, folks. We’ll see you tomorrow at ten. Late Edition is next.

The number of visitors swelled considerably the day after Lasker’s boat made Ben at Ten, which is to say there were seldom fewer than a half-dozen people and sometimes as many as twenty. The kids took to selling coffee and sweet rolls and turned a nice profit right from the beginning.

Hal Riordan, who owned the Fort Moxie lumberyard, showed up. He wandered through the cabins, where the Laskers had installed a battery-powered heater. He peered closely at the hull and at the masts, and he finally arrived at Lasker’s front door. “Something you got to see,” he said, leading the way back to the boat. Hal had been old when Lasker was in school; his hair, gray in those days, was now silver. He was tall and methodical, a man who would not go to the bathroom without careful consideration. “This is very odd, Tom,” he said.

“What’s the matter?” asked Lasker.

“Take a look where the mast is joined to the cabin roof.”

Lasker did. “What about it?”

“It’s all one piece. The mast should have been manufactured separately, I would think. And then bolted down. Everything here looks as if it came out of a single mold.”

Riordan was right: there were no fittings, no screws, nothing. Lasker grunted, not knowing what to say.

In the morning Lasker leased a trailer and brought in a contractor from Grand Forks to lift the yacht onto it and move it close to the barn.

The crowd was growing every day. “You ought to charge admission,” suggested Frank Moll, an ex-mayor and retired customs officer. “You got people coming in all the way from Fargo.” Moll was easygoing, bearded, short, strongly built. He was one of Lasker’s old drinking buddies.

“What do you make of it, Frank?” he asked. They were standing in the driveway, watching Ginny and Moll’s wife, Peg, try to direct traffic.

Moll looked at him, looked at the boat. “You really don’t know how this got here, Tom?” There was an accusation in his tone.