"Because, my dear Mr. Carter, they are going to give me £9,000 for the produce we have collected, and another £8,000 for the fort and the good-will of the business. How's that? £17,000 cash against a £1,500 outlay in three months. That's better than staying out here in West Africa." Carter had been carrying the duck in his hand. He put it into his pocket. "I don't wonder you're exultant. I suppose no other girl on earth ever made a coup like that. And as for us here at the factory, that means our occupation's gone?" "Oh, I hope you'll go back to Malla-Nulla, where you were, and work for us there." "I think not. As you're going home, and I cannot be of any immediate use to O'Neill and Craven, I prefer to leave the firm's employ if you'll let me?" "We shall be really sorry to lose you. But perhaps you have something better in view?" "To tell the truth, I have. And it strikes me if I'm to make a fortune, I must look out for it myself." "I quite agree with you," said Kate. "What was that you were going to show me? The thing you put in your pocket, I mean?" "A keepsake that was given me. It's a charm, a ju-ju that will bring fortune to somebody, and I was going to give it to you. But on your own recommendation I shall keep it for myself." "You are quite right. It will be safer for us to go our own several ways from here." CHAPTER XIII AT THE LIVERPOOL END Now, Godfrey O'Neill, deceased, was a man who at various times in his life had extracted from West Africa very considerable sums of money. He was shrewd, he was popular, he had the knack of resisting sickly climates, and he knew the possibilities of the Oil Rivers seaboard down to the last bag of kernels. According to his own account he had started life as a ship's purser. People who were more fond of accuracy mentioned that as a matter of history he had first gone as cabin-boy in a palm oil brig. But be that as it may, he had been associated with the Coast from his earliest days, and at the age of five-and-twenty was trading there on his own account. At first he stuck to an old trading hulk with moorings in the muddy Monk River and battled with its swarms of cockroaches and got together a business; but by degrees he gained the confidence of the native riparian magnates, and by the time he was thirty he had built on piles a fine set of factory buildings on the bank, had bought a treaty with the then King of Okky, and had built another factory at Malla-Nulla in spite of the fact that the beach there was one of the most surf-smitten on the Coast. After that he felt that his Liverpool correspondents were getting more than their due share of his hard-wrung profits, and so he put the Coast factories under managers and came back to the Mersey. And thereafter, with occasional visits to the Coast and the Islands, he made Liverpool his headquarters.