sister ships
for the same owners--passing each other on the wharf, brushing elbows in
the office, putting to sea time and time together, sailing, again and
again, side by side for days together, and yet never seeming to see each
other. Indifference was the word; but if by any chance a third person
referred to one in the presence of the other in anything like
complimentary terms, that third person was soon let to know that he
wasn't making any hit with whichever Captain Sickles it was who had to
listen. If it was Norman of the _Sirius_, he would shift his feet and
start to stare intently at the ceiling or the sky; if it was Oliver of
the _Orion_, with a snarl of disgust he would get up and walk off.

I had heard a lot of the Sickles cousins, but had never had more than a
hailing acquaintance with either of them, until this early fall when my
firm chartered, among others, the _Orion_ and the _Sirius_, and sent me
down to Newport News to see that they lost no time in loading and
getting out. It was the time of a threatened coal famine in New England,
with coal freights up to two dollars a ton, and my firm chartering
everything they could get hold of to take the coal from the railroads at
Newport News and rush it east.

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