Kate Meredith, Financier

by Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

He turned to his host. "You do the thing rather palatially here, Mr. Slade. Board walls and real glass in the windows! We've bamboo walls at Malla-Nulla that let in the dust and the mosquitoes and the Krooboys' stares just as they occur. It felt rather like living in a bird-cage till one got used to it."

"The walls are Laura's doing. You know she was at school in a convent in Las Palmas, and came home with all sorts of extravagant notions. Why, she actually insisted on a tablecloth for meals, and napkins. I'll trouble you, napkins! And yet they still call us palm oil ruffians in Liverpool, and firmly believe that we live on orange-colored palm oil chop, which we pick out of calabashes with our fingers. I sent K. O'Neill a photograph of this room by the last mail, with the table laid for chop, and flowers as you see in a china bowl, in the hope he'd be impressed by it, and raise my screw."

"He's quite likely to do it, too," said Carter, "if I understand Mr. K. right. He's always insisting in his letters to Malla-Nulla that if we make ourselves comfortable, and adapt ourselves to the climate, we shall be able to do more and better work. By the way, do you know Mr. K. O'Neill at all? At Malla-Nulla we only know him on paper."

"I'm in the same box," Slade confessed. "Godfrey, his predecessor, of course I knew well enough. But this new chap I only know from his letters, and they're a deal too rousing for my easy-going tastes. Ah, here's the boy with a tray of chop for you. Observe the parsley; that's Laura's latest triumph in Coast gardening. Boy, Mr. Carter will sleep in the spare bed in my room. See that there are no live things inside the mosquito bar."

"I thank you," said Carter firmly, "but I am going to do as I said."

"He wants to go back to Malla-Nulla," Slade explained to his daughter, "and I tell him it is suicide to think of such a thing. Here, you have a go at him, Laura." Slade always put off onto someone else anything which he found hard to do himself.

But Laura Slade read a certain doggedness in Carter's face that told her what to say. She did not join in imploring him to stay at Smooth River when he had so obviously determined to go. But instead, her mind flew to some scheme that might make his passage less desperately risky. "I am sure father could spare you some men. With an escort you might get through. I wish you were not so plucky."

Carter laughed. "Oh, I am frightened hard enough, but I should be still more frightened at what I should think of myself if anything happened to Mr. Smith which I could have prevented if I'd been there. It's very kind of you to offer an escort, and I'd thought of that before; but I'm sure I shall be able to move quicker and more quietly without one. But if Mr. Slade could lend me a gun, I'd feel a lot more comfortable with that."

"Certainly, my boy, certainly. You shall have my Winchester, and I believe I can scare up a revolver somewhere."

"You are very good. I have a revolver already, but it's only useful to me as a sort of knuckleduster. I couldn't hit a haystack with it ten yards off. Same with the rifle; I've never used one. But where I was brought up in Wharfedale, you see, the Governor had some glebe, and his income was small. We mostly lived on rabbits and a few grouse in the season, and so you see I learned to be pretty useful with a shot gun."