"We fit for two cocktail, plenty-long ones. Well, as I was saying, Balgarnie, me lad, I've always had a bit of soft place for Laura, though I suppose she rightly is snuff and butter, by Crumbs you'd never guess it from her looks unless you went over her with a lens, and I'd just feel all broken up if she was to go the way that lot usually do go. So if this young Carter, who seems a nice clean-run sort of lad, will marry her with a ring, I'm going to weigh in with at least a best silver-plate teapot for a wedding present."
"You can put me down for the ditto sugar and cream," said the purser with emotion. "It was a kiddie just like Laura I was fond of myself. Only—only— Well, Skipper, I suppose a good many of us are blackguards down here on the Coast. Why the sulphur doesn't your boy bring those cocktails?"
But at this point Captain Image broke off the conversation. "By Crumbs!" said he, "here's Miss Kate." And then he did a thing that made Mr. Balgarnie whistle with sheer surprise. He went down the ladder to help his passenger on board.
"Now, if I had done that," the Purser mused to himself, "it would have meant a lot. But my Whiskers! I never thought I should live to see old Cappie Image trotting down onto the front doorsteps to receive a mere female passenger. The Old Man must see enough solid dollars in that girl to buy himself that hen farm outside Cardiff he hopes to retire upon."
Captain Image stood on the grating at the foot of the ladder and waved his panama in respectful salutation. The beer-colored river swirled along the steamer's rusty flank a foot beneath him, and the pungent smell of crushed marigolds which it carried made him cough. The sun shimmered exactly overhead in a sky of the most extravagant blue, and the greenery which fenced in the slimy mud banks hung in the breathless heat without so much as a twitter.
Miss Kate O'Neill was seated in a Madeira chair which stood on the floor of a big green surf boat, and the gleaming Krooboys perched on the gunwales paddled with more than their usual industry. The headman, who straddled at the steering oar in the stern, wore a tail-coat of an extremely sporting cut and pattern and a woven grass skullcap in honor of the occasion. And all this pomp and circumstance was uninvited. But somehow people had the knack of offering special service and deference to Miss O'Neill.
The only other woman on the M'poso, the austere wife of a Benin trader, looked over the steamer's rail in gloomy disapproval. These were no modes for Coast wear. A billowy grass-green muslin dress that no Krooboy laundry-man could wash twice without spoiling; neat, narrow pipe-clayed shoes with no thickness of sole, and ridiculous heels; a pale green felt hat, actually insulted by a feather in its band; and final absurdity of all, a parasol, a flimsy thing of silk, and ribbon, and effervescent chiffon, which would be absolutely ruined by a splash of rain, instead of the big sensible white cotton affair, with the dark green lining, which all ordinary people know is the standard wear on that torrid Coast.
"Faugh," said the trader's wife, "and Captain Image says she's one of the smartest business women in the world to-day, and that fat, greedy purser would propose to her in the next five minutes if he thought he'd a cat's chance of being accepted. They think her good-looking, too, I'll be bound, just because she wears those unsuitable clothes, and has pink color in her cheeks. Well, the clothes will be whisps of rag by this day week and"—the poor woman sighed here—"the Coast will get the color and the plumpness out of her face, and make her as lean and yellow as the rest of us in a month."
"You're a good, kind man," Miss O'Neill was saying to a very smiling Captain Image, "and I know I did tell the bedroom steward to have my big trunks got up on deck; but, you see, I'm a woman, and therefore it's my prerogative to be able to change my mind without being openly abused for it. So I want you, please, to be very nice and let me stay on the M'poso a little longer."
"Miss Kate, I was sure you'd find that what I said was true, and that Smooth River factory was no place for a lady like you. You see those dead niggers are fresh now, but when the sun gets on 'em—er—I mean there's no trade coming into this section of the Coast just now till that blessed old King of Okky opens the roads again, and he won't do that yet awhile on his own dirty account, and neither you nor I have got the ju-ju that will make him. My dear Miss, I'm just as pleased as a monkey with green—er—with a green tail to hear you're going to take the round trip home with me, and if my clean collars do run out, you must remember that we all wear panjammers when we're south of the Islands and the trippers. If only I'd thought of shipping a jack-wash when I got my Krooboys at Sarry Leone. Well, one can't be prepared for everything."