George Carter found even upon the surface of his superior officer at Malla-Nulla factory much that was mysterious. There were moments when Mr. Smith exhibited an unmistakable gentility; but these were rare; and they usually occurred when the pair of them lunched _en tête-à-tête_ at 11 o'clock, and Smith had worked off his morning qualm, and had not commenced his afternoon refreshment. With a larger audience he was one part cynic and six parts ruffian; he was admitted to be the most skilful compounder of cocktails on all that section of the West African seaboard; and he sampled his own brews in such quantities, and with such impunity, as gave the lie to all text-books on topical medicine. His head was bald, and the gray hair on his face and above his ears was either as short as clippers could make it, or else bristled with a two weeks' growth. Day and night he wore more or less shrunken pyjamas, from the neck buttonhole of which a single eyeglass dangled at the end of a piece of new black silk ribbon. Carter guessed his age as somewhere between fifty and fifty-five, and wondered why on earth Messrs. O'Neill and Craven kept such a disreputable old person as the head of what might have been a very prosperous factory. Indeed, theories on this very point were already lodged in the older man's brain. "It's this new partner, K. O'Neill, that I don't like the sound of," he explained to Carter one day. "By the way, who is he?" "Don't know. As I told you I was staying with my father at the vicarage, and I was engaged by wire the day before the _M'poso_ sailed, and only caught her by the skin of my teeth. There was nobody there to see me off, and on the boat all they could tell me was that 'K.' came into the business when the late head died." "Old Godfrey, that was"--Swizzle-Stick Smith sighed--"poor old Godfrey O'Neill! He was one of the best fellows going in the old days, not a bit like the usual cut of palm-oil ruffian as we used to call the traders then. And, my God! to think of my coming down to the grade of one of them myself." Again the subject cropped up when one of their rare mails came in. "Here's expense!" grumbled Swizzle-Stick Smith. "Letters landed at our Monk River factory, and sent on to Mulla-Nulla by special runner. K. O'Neill's orders, the Monk River agent says. In the old days you could always bet on the beach being too bad for the steamer to call twice out of three times, and you weren't pestered with a mail more than once in six months. That's mainly why I've stuck by O'Neill and Craven all these years. Now this new man wants our output of kernels to be doubled by this time next year, and hopes I'll take steps to work up the rubber connection. If I can't see my way to do all this, will I kindly give my reasons in writing, and if necessary forward same by runner to a steamer's calling point, so that reply may be in Liverpool within six weeks at latest. What do you think of that?"