He understood. The cholera had crept upon the lorcha before it had left Vigan, and all the way down the coast it had been doing its dread work about him, plunged in the oblivion of his solitary orgy.
There had been seventy people on the lorcha when it had left Vigan; and there were still a half-hundred. They were huddled forward, a squalid, rancid, and coloured group, their eyes wistfully set upon a black pot vibrating upon a fire of small sticks. They were from the famine district of Vigan and had not eaten for a long time, but their attention was not solely upon the vessel holding their handful of rice. At times they threw black looks toward the quay. Fear was upon them; fear, not of the impalpable Death hovering about them, but fear of the White Man's Quarantine as represented by the big, passive policeman standing there like a menace; the White Man's Quarantine, ready to clutch them at the first sign of disease and tear them off to its den, to a fearful and ever-mysterious fate.
Burke looked at them, then pointed at the boy at his feet, but they seemed to see nothing. He sprang to the deck and he shouted. They turned their heads, scowled indifferently at the little stretched body, then their eyes returned to the black kettle quivering on the fire.
"Here, here, that won't do," cried Burke, all the maudlin softness out of his face, as he marched upon the group. "Get up, you hound!" he thundered, kicking the nearest man. "Get up, there! And you, too," he added, cuffing another. "Get up and take care of the kid!"
He laid about him furiously for a moment, then his rage oozed out of him and he stood silent and at loss. For the resistance offered him was unlike any he had ever met. The men did not budge; they took the blows like blocks of wood, remaining as they were, without a tremor, their eyes glowing sullenly at the deck between their knees; and the passiveness of that resistance was so monstrously powerful that Burke felt his throat tighten in a rageful, childish impulse to break out weeping.
On a box, a little apart from the crowd, there sat a fat, sleek, pale-yellow personage. He observed the scene through his narrow eyes with the arrogantly skeptical air of the Chino mestizo. His falsetto voice now broke the silence.
"Porque no Usted?" he said, suavely, while his eyes narrowed to a line with a gleam in it. "Why not you?"
Burke opened his mouth, left it open for a good second, then shut it again with a grinding of teeth.
"By God, I'll do it," he muttered, as he turned away.