The girl leaned over the chart table and began to draw, and Captain Image sat back on his camp stool and nursed a knee and frankly admired her. He did not in the least believe in this Mokki venture, and had not the smallest intention of breaking in upon his usual routine by going there. But he had (so he told himself) a distinct eye for the beautiful and the romantic, and he found his ideals in these matters very considerably filled by Miss Kate O'Neill, her dress, and her occupations. "There," she said at last, and handed him the sketch. Captain Image looked at it, laughed, and shook his head. He had all of a sailor's intolerance for the amateur map-drawer. Moreover, he had traded in part of the Oil Rivers for twenty years, and if he did not know the back country personally, he heard it spoken of in the factories and in steamer smoke-rooms as matter of intimate knowledge almost daily. "Well, Captain, don't just shake your head and laugh. Let me have your criticisms." "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."