She tried with cold logic to reason out the arguments for and against, and to strike a balance between them. But for once her brain refused to act. Even the novel, which she read and did not absorb, did not offer her the necessary hint. It was an old trick of hers, this reading of a dozen chapters of weak fiction, to get an inspiration, and so far it had never failed her. She was an omnivorous novel reader. She went through quite two-thirds of the fiction brought out annually by British publishers, and could never, next morning, have passed the easiest examination in a novel she had read the night before. But all her clever business ideas were evolved when she was reading these paltry books.
At last she could endure the vague things that oppressed her no longer. She dropped the book on the floor. And then she got up and went into the secretary's narrow room next door. She found cable forms and sat at a table. Then she wrote glibly enough this message.
"_Burgoyne, Monk River, West Africa, Forward this to Cascaes Mokki special runner want you act our agent Las Palmas_ 2,400 _commence cable acceptance or refusal, O'Neill._"
She counted up the words, laid down her pencil, and laughed. "At any rate," she said, "that will give one a chance. And George was fool enough to think that Mr. Cascaes was running after me. Oh, I have no patience with men who can't see further through the fog than that."
It was Captain Image returning red and wrathful from an unsuccessful cargo foray amongst the southern and eastern factories that Carter met the day after his arrival at the Coast. The mariner had heard of the deal at Mokki, and felt personally affronted that a nest of cargo which he had already looked upon as his own should have been handed over once more to the Germans.
"So you're on the beach, are you," said he, looking Carter up and down with vast disapproval. "I must say you look it. I've seen old Swizzle-Stick Smith come down after a jaunt in the bush and I thought he couldn't be beat for general shagginess and rags. But you give him points. What did Miss Kate bounce you for?"
"Same thing. And now you've come to ask me to take you home as a distressed British subject, I suppose. Well, Carter-me-lad, a deck passage is your whack according to consular understanding, but you've sat in my chart house and you've sent me cargo, and so I'm going to put my hand in my own breeches pocket and take you home in the second class. And I tell you what: Chips and the bo's'n have got a shop in the foc's'le that I'm not supposed to know about, and if you care to go in there and get enough rig out to see you home, I'll foot the bill."