"I'm not saying, of course, that it's not a very clever map. It is that, and the way you've put the rivers in would beat the knowledge of many who have been on the Coast for years. You've quite the knack of drawing a map, Miss Kate, though there's another creek here that you've missed, and this continuation of what we call the Dog's-leg channel you must have guessed at, because I never heard of its being navigated, and nobody knows where it goes to."
"It leads to my new factory at Mokki."
"Well, it may do, though you can take it from me there's no water for a steamboat that draws even eleven foot six. But the thing you're mainly wrong in is this part you've marked as the Okky country. You haven't carried it anywhere near far enough back."
Miss O'Neill tapped at her firm white teeth with the end of the pencil. "You're quoting from the Royal Geographical Map," she suggested.
"Well, Miss, I am," Captain Image admitted, "and I know it's just about as inaccurate as magazine fiction in a whole lot of places. But I shouldn't set myself up to buck against a Royal Geographical map unless I knew."
"Neither should I. But you see maps have always been a fad with me, and since Mr. Godfrey died, and I had the whole weight of O'Neill and Craven landed upon my one pair of shoulders whether I liked it or not, I looked upon maps from a very different point of view. As everybody on the Coast knows everybody else's business, I need hardly point out to you that during Mr. Godfrey's latter days O'Neill and Craven had been allowed to run down pretty badly, and when I took hold, the firm was—well, what shall I say?"
"Dicky," suggested Captain Image kindly. "But I can quite understand all the hard words you'd like to let out if I wasn't here."
The girl laughed. "Well, we'll put it, Captain, that the firm was decidedly dicky, and I've had a most interesting time in pulling it onto its feet. Incidentally I've given up drawing maps from an amateur's point of view, and have been drawing them with an entire eye to business in the future. You've no idea how interesting it is to a business woman, Captain, when some special information comes to her and she is able to go to her map and fill in a mile or so of river that she'd had to leave a gap for, or sketch in a newly-discovered trade route through what was thought to be hopeless swamp, or fill in part of the boundary line of territory that up to then had merely merged off into blank space."
"My Crumbs," said Captain Image admiringly, "but you are a daisy, Miss Kate."
"It was only the day before I left Liverpool that I got news of where the Okky territory ended. The French have been having some mysterious expedition in at the back there for purposes of their own, and the officer in command very unwisely caned the only other white man with him, who was a Zouave, and wasn't really white at all. He wanted revenge, so he came to me and told, and got fifty pounds, and said he'd never enjoyed letting off spite so much in his life before."