"Warn't you talkin' to my cousin awhile ago about the same thing?"
"I was, though I don't remember telling you about it."
"H-m," he sneered, "I thought so. Y' always go to him first."
"Yes, I do!" I snapped at him. "And why? Because he knows his mind. And he's a man to give an answer without using up an afternoon talking about it. He said he'd have the Sirius to anchor in Boston Harbor by Christmas Eve or give me a good reason why."
"He did, did he? Then set this down in your log"—with the end of a prodigiously thick forefinger he was tapping the bar as he said it:—"The Orion will be laying to anchor in Boston Harbor by Christmas Eve or there'll be a damn good reason why."
Right here I should say that there was more than a rivalry of craftsmanship between the Sickles cousins. Once, thinking it was the Sirius, Norman Sickles's sweetheart, a very pretty and a very good girl, had gone aboard the Orion as it lay in Boston Harbor. Oliver at once locked her in the cabin, put to sea, and carried her to Philadelphia, where, urged by her mother, and to save her good name as she thought, she married Oliver. But that her heart was still with Norman was current gossip in the fleet.
Because he had lately heard that I had been free-spoken in my comment on that exploit was why Captain Oliver now—his forefinger tapping the bar and he eying me from under his hat-brim—added to his "good reason" the word that, no matter what my firm or any other firm thought of this or that, which warn't none o' their business anyway, he wanted 'em all to understand that he was as capable of getting a quick passage out of a vessel as any Norman Sickles that ever walked; which gave me a fine chance to say: "Well, the place to prove that is at sea, and not in a barroom ashore."
Not very delicate—no; but it sent him almost on the run down aboard his vessel, to clear his decks for loading, which was mostly what I was after.
And I let it leak out—the answer of the two cousins about being in Boston before Christmas. A little rivalry of that kind doesn't do any harm; and I wanted to walk into the office on Christmas Eve and say, "The last of that Newport News coal is lying out there in the stream waiting to dock," and then go home, even as many of the crews would want to go home, with an easy conscience for a Christmas holiday.