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." 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.