Again an embarrassed silence, then another burst:
"A razor."
"I'll send the things this afternoon," said Huntington, gladder than his voice implied.
Burke went back to his work. After disinfecting his little hospital he executed, with the aid of Tionko, the Chino mestizo, whose oily good will and linguistic ability were fast becoming indispensable, a plot hatched during the sleeplessness of the night. First the men, then the women, were filed into a bath house made of sails and forced to bathe in warm, carbolised water, while their clothes boiled in cauldrons outside. By sunset the passenger list of the Bonita was clean, at least externally.
Then the usual commotion forward told Burke that his work had begun again. This time it was a child-mother, a pitiful, little black-eyed thing, with a squalling whitish baby at her breast. It was too late for the shore boat, so he cared for them. At midnight the baby died and, two hours later, the mother; they lay side by side and, of the two, it was the mother's face that looked the child's, and the baby's the withered old. At daybreak the boat took them away.
Weeks followed, filled with the same stagnancy of horror. The work had settled down to flat routine and life became a fearful monotony as day after day poured its brazen heat upon the empested boat. The only element of excitement lay in the ebb and flow of disease. On some days two or three, once even five, fell, and Burke's hospital over-filled and poured out its burden upon the deck; at other times there would be periods of three or four days without a case, and once the expiration of the mystical five days which was to free the lorcha from its imprisonment was almost reached when two men were suddenly felled as if by the same thunderbolt. Burke's worst periods were when the hospital was empty. On such days the routine of his duties took him only a little past noon, and then would come the full bitterness of the struggle. He found something to do and worked with teeth set, but his hands trembled, his nerves were tortured, and his eyes felt as if being pulled out of their sockets.
Then in the maddening monotony of this life there crept another element.
Before lying down to his snatch of horror-broken sleep, Jerry was accustomed to take a plunge over the side, although the waters of the bay were full of sharks. One night, as he was preparing to climb back upon the lorcha, he reached in vain for the rope that he had left dangling for the purpose. It had been pulled up just out of his grasp. Treading water by the black hull, Burke shouted repeatedly, but a sleep deep as the night that wrapped the vessel seemed to have its inhabitants, and his cries got no response.
"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."