The day was heavy with heat. The wind had died, the sea was glazed, and the tin roofs of Manila glistened white. A torpor fell from the brazen heavens, and all day Burke struggled beneath it in a frenzy of toil. When he had cleaned the boat thoroughly, he arranged the little cabin into a hospital. Almost immediately it had its occupant. A boy was down. Jerry laid him on his cot, pried his teeth open with his knife, and poured some chlorodyne between them; then walked to the mainmast, and soon to the watchers on shore the leprous banner rose against the gory hues of the setting sun. The boat came and took the child away. When the launch came, in the morning, Burke was standing at the head of the ladder. All the traces of a fearful night were in his face, and yet Huntington's scrutiny found something satisfactory in the man. The old khaki suit had been washed, and hung, still damp, upon his frame. More medicines and disinfectants, a supply of food and distilled water, several objects, very vulgar and very grim, were passed up, and then the doctor asked: "Anything you need, old man?" Burke shook his head in indecisive negative. "I have you on the pay-roll," added the officer, casually; "assistant inspector; three-and-a-half a day." Burke dropped his eyes to the deck. Then he blurted out: "Yes, two khakis." "All right," said Huntington, rapidly measuring with his eye the frame before him. "Anything else?" 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. * * * * *