n the first morning out, to
stand his watch. A word blown across the deck, when he was thought to be
still in his bunk below, halted him in his walk aft. He turned and
stared at the man who was speaking, whereupon followed such a sudden and
foolish twist to the conversation that he might just as well have been
told.

Throughout his trick at the wheel Drislane said nothing, but every
moment the compass could spare his eyes saw them roaming across to where
the _Orion_, like ourselves, was plugging through the short green seas
for home. When his watch was done he borrowed my glasses, climbed by
painful relays to the masthead and trained them on the _Orion_. After he
came down and had gone below, I went aloft and spent the rest of the
morning trying to see what it was that Drislane may have seen on the
deck of Oliver Sickles's vessel.

Was it a woman's head showing above the cabin companionway? or was it a
man passenger Oliver Sickles had taken aboard at the last minute? If a
man, he surely was no seagoer; for in the two hours that I watched he
never once stepped out on deck. He leaned dejectedly, or it might be
patiently, but, either way, motionless as a stanchion against the
companion casing, his soft flapping hat and the shoulders of a loose
coat showing just above the woodwork. Man or woman, the face was pointed
steadily toward the _Sirius_.

Our captain said it was a passenger of some kind. It had to be, he
said, because during the morning he had kept an eye on the _Orion's_
deck and accounted for every man of her crew, which numbered exactly the
same as his own; even for the cook, who had shown himself on deck to
heave a bucket of galley refuse over the rail. It could not be an extra
hand shipped for the trip, because no hand would be allowed to stand on
the cabin stairs.

And did he think it was a man or a woman? The shoulders in the loose
coat looked wide enough to be a man's. And I looked at him and he at me.
So was Drislane's Rose big enough for a man, but we said no more of that
then--Drislane had just come on deck and was making his way aft. Again
he borrowed my glasses, went aloft, and trained them on the _Orion_.
From time to time he looked down to the man at the wheel, as if to hint
to him to get a little nearer the _Orion_, but the man at the wheel had
already got a quiet word from the captain. We were to leeward. "Keep
off--keep off--off--off--!" Captain Norman was saying in a low voice to
the helmsman