In our two new schooner captains, Norman and Oliver Sickles, I found, when I came to have dealings with them, a pair who knew their business. Implacable toward each other they surely were, but so long as their feelings weren't delaying their sailing days, that was their own business. Tall, broad, powerful chaps they both were, twenty-eight or thirty years of age to look at, slow in thought, heavy in action, but competent sailormen always. I had no need to know their records, nor to talk with them too many hours, to find that out. Not much about a schooner, be she two or five master, nor much about the North Atlantic coast, that they didn't know.
I had been three months in Newport News, Christmas was at hand, and the railroad people were telling me that they would have no more coal for my firm until after New Year's. There were twenty thousand tons not yet gone; but if my four four-master schooners could sail next morning, and the five-masters, Orion and Sirius, get away the morning after, that twenty thousand tons would be cleaned up.
I hunted up the Captain Sickles of the Sirius and put the question to him: "Captain Norman, if I can get you loaded and cleared by the morning after to-morrow, what's the chance of your making Boston by Christmas?" And he answered, after some thought: "It's a westerly wind with a medium glass to-day. It ought to hang on westerly and dry for another four or five days. Clear me by the morning after to-morrow, and I'll lay the Sirius to anchor in Boston Harbor Christmas Eve, or"—he was a man of serious ways, and spoke most seriously now—-"or I'll give you a good reason why."
I hunted up Captain Oliver Sickles of the Orion, and I found him having a drink in the bar of the Tidewater Café. He looked as if he'd welcome a quarrel, but that was nothing strange in him. I put the same question to him that I had put to his cousin, and the answer came in almost the same words as to the medium glass and the westerly wind, but at that point he looked sharply at me.
"And when does the Sirius sail?" he asked.
"The morning after to-morrow."
"And"—suspiciously—"who first that morning, the Sirius or me?"
"I don't know. You'll be loaded and cleared together—it's for yourselves to say who sails first."
"And what did he say?"
Captain Oliver had a hectoring way about him which used to make me promise myself that some day, after he'd done hauling coal for my outfit, I'd tell him what I thought of him. "What did who say?" I asked him now.