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. "Don't let her get any nearer, leastwise while he's aloft with the glasses." It looked as if we would have to wait to get to Boston to settle the question. Meantime, if Drislane would only try to forget everything of shore matters, he might be getting great comfort of a run like this. If he were himself, he would by now, being half in the way of a poet and half hoping some day to be an artist, be drawing little water-colors and writing little rhymes of these two big schooners racing home together. 'Twould have been well worth his paint and paper. The _Orion_ and the _Sirius_ were two of the best in their class and more trimly modelled than most. What the _Orion_ looked like we must have looked like, and she was something I used to spend whole watches on deck just looking at. She carried an open rail amidships, and her white-painted stanchions, carved to hour-glass form, with the white-painted flat hand-rail atop, stood clearly, sharply, beautifully out above her black lower sides and the pale-green seas.