Captain Image dabbed with his forefinger on Carter's coat sleeve and left a print of tobacco ash. "You buy up Owe-it Slade, me lad, and not only is your fortune made, but--well," he added rather lamely, "you buy him up and just remember I told you to."
"Well," said Image desperately, "I didn't intend to tell you, but all up and down the Coast, and in the hotels in Las Palmas, and even in the bars and offices here, the boys don't like the way Miss Kate is playing it on you. It's all right for a girl to take to business, if she's built that way, but she ought to play the game. Of course the general idea is, me lad, that you and she started sweet-hearting and had a turn-up, but of course I'm in the know, and I've called 'em dam' liars every time they've started that tale, and told 'em about Laura and how you were fixed up long before Miss Kate came down onto the Coast. Why, Carter-me-lad, I've backed up my words with bets to that extent that if you were to marry the lady now by any kind of accident, I should stand to lose what with one fiver and another, a matter of two hundred and fifty pounds."
Carter laughed. "That puts it finally out of the region of possibility, doesn't it? I can't let you lose a pile like that. But all the same I'm not going to interfere with Miss O'Neill. If Slade's useful to her, let her keep him. I'm much obliged to a lot of officious idiots for sympathizing with me, but really they're moving on a lot too fast. It will be quite time for other people to be sorry for me when I start in to be sorry for myself. Besides, I thought you, at any rate, were a strong admirer of Miss O'Neill's?"
"I am," said Captain Image patiently. He always flattered himself that he left the more eloquent parts of his speech at Sierra Leone on each trip north, and picked them up again there next voyage for vigorous use on the Coast. It was his pride that he conformed most suitably to Liverpool's sedate atmosphere. "I admire Miss Kate as a lady more than anyone I know, and if she were only twenty years older, and I could afford it, I wouldn't mind going in for her myself. But it's her business ideas, as she showed them over that factory of Edmondson's, that I can't stand. The way she stuck up the rent on you, me lad, is the limit. Why, if that sort of thing went on, nobody would be safe. It's Oil-Trust morals. I'm Welsh myself, but I do draw the line somewhere."