"But cargo. Let me suggest to you again, cargo?"
"Well, Miss Kate, there's no other lady on earth I'd say the same to, but I'll not deny the fact--to you, mind, and quite between ourselves--that cargo interests me. And letting you further into what's considered one of the deadest of secrets, there are times when cargo commission can just out-balance fines for being late with mails. You see I guess what you have in your mind, Miss. You want me to run back and take off the cargo that's waiting at Malla-Nulla before those Okky-men come down and raid it."
Miss O'Neill lay back against the cushion and sipped composedly at her hard-boiled tea. "There," she said, "I knew you'd consent. There's only one little detail you've made a mistake about. How soon can you be off? Judging from the music of the winches, you're working in the cargo here at a famous speed."
"The mate reported to me just before you came on board that he'd have the lot shipped by five o'clock. Those passenger boys of ours that you've made factory boys for the time being were working splendidly, so Mr. Mate said. But what's this little mistake, Miss Kate? I can't go right away back to O'Neill and Craven's factory at Monk River, if that's what you mean."
"Oh, my dear Captain Image, don't think me unreasonable. I shouldn't dream of asking you to do such a thing as that. I don't even want you to go out over Smooth River bar for the present. But I'd better tell you just what's happened. You see all afternoon the Krooboys who had run away have been coming back, and some of the clerks have turned up, and then came Mr. and Mrs. da Silva. We had quite a gathering of it, and as Mr. Carter set them all on to digging holes and tidying things away as they arrived, by this time all the--well, you wouldn't know there'd been fighting.
"But the first to turn up at the factory after you'd left me there was not one of our own people, but a caller. He was the agent in charge of the German factory at Mokki. He turned up in a dug-out, and he gave us to understand that he was the most frightened man in Africa. He said his voyage down the creeks was one series of miraculous escapes. He said he'd come to take shelter under the British flag; but when he found that by an oversight we hadn't got such a piece of furniture about the place, and when he saw the holes in the walls and the roof and the--the--what there was lying about under that blazing sun in the clearing, he was quite of opinion that he hadn't run far enough."