"Listen," finally said Burke, talking calmly in the silence. "Listen. You know how I can swim. If that rope does not come down in ten seconds, I'll swim to the big army boat to the right there. I'll come back with fifty soldiers, and we'll hang you all to the mast. Remember, the sharks do not touch me."
As mysteriously as it had been raised, the rope dropped softly till its end touched the water. When Burke, dripping, sprang on deck, a heavy silence was upon the boat, broken only by the hoarse breathing of the sleepers, spread about in limp attitudes like the dead upon the battlefield.
A few days later, as he took up the demijohn in which he kept his drinking water, brought distilled from shore, he found the cork askew. He was always careful to shut the vessel hermetically, and a sudden suspicion made him turn the demijohn over and pour its contents out upon the deck. The water gurgled out, and when the vessel was empty Jerry found a little piece of cloth sticking to the inside of the gullet. He drew it out, and an icy shiver ran up his spine. He held in his hand a little square of red and yellow calico. The last cholera victim of the _Bonita_, a woman, had worn a sarong of red and yellow calico.
He threw the demijohn overboard, and when he had obtained a new one from shore he slept against it at night.
Burke began to observe his crew, and this gave him little satisfaction. Beneath the oriental passiveness, malevolence was boiling. His orders, it is true, were obeyed; but it was with heaviness of movement and dulness of eye; and in the periods of rest, sullen, squatting groups formed, that broke out in whisperings and oblique looks, to be scattered usually by the bowing, smirking, oily Chino, Tionko. And of all the ominous signs, there was none that displeased Burke more than the behaviour of the Chino--this evident eagerness to save the face of things, to glaze over the dark working beneath with a serene surface.
They were on one of these periods of immunity from disease which drew all nerves tense. Three days had passed, then four; they entered upon the fifth. Twenty-four hours more would set the _Bonita_ free from the iron clutches of the quarantine. That day was a bad one. The solidarity in misfortune that had bound the unfortunates of the lorcha broke into a ferocious individualism. All work ceased that morning. The population of the _Bonita_ divided into groups; these segregated more and more as the day advanced, till finally each man was squatting alone, with glaring threat in his eyeballs. God help the one who should come down; the execration of the whole boat was already focussed upon him.