“He's taken four months to get up to the 'left blooming alone'! At that rate it will be years before he gets to the finish. I'll be mad if he stays on this hooker another month. I'll chuck the three of them--organ, boy, and tune--overboard.” “If you make yourself a fool like that, no more work from that boy. Don't be a fool and spoil this game. We're out till November. Let's make the best of it.” It was not clean work. The reek of the fish-raw, cooked, smoked, and drying in the sun-saturated everything, even the damper. The brown, shrivelled things were scattered in orderly profusion wherever the sun could catch them to top them off prior to bagging. The bitter, eye-searing smoke from the red mangrove fire in the hold, where the meagre catch of yesterday was lying on a couple of trays, stung the nostrils. The odour was as interminable as the half-accomplished tune, and Breezy Bill writhed. He was not new to the game, but bad luck had been the portion of the ship from the start, and small things irritated him, rasping his far from sensitive soul. “I think you are going to catch fever, Jim. That's what's the matter with you. At the mission I used to read about that bird you call the brain-fever bird. It just keeps on whistling the same old thing, and white men go mad. That 'Last Rose of Summer,' it's got hold of you. Don't be a fool! It's only a good tune half done. It won't kill anybody--at any rate, a tough old shell-back like you!” “Oh, bother! Stinks and rotten 'Last Rose of Summer' are driving me mad. I could stand lots of both if we were doing well. They might be forty overproof and played by forty bands, and every darned piccolo of them out of tune, if only we were making money. Come, let's up stick and away. We can't do worse and we might do better on that bit of 'reef Mammerroo talks about. Here, Mammerroo, stop that blasted corroboree! Come and tell us where that little fella reef sit down.” Mammerroo shuffled down to the hatchway covering and traced a chart of the locality with a grimy forefinger. “That fella reef sit down 'nother side Red Hill alongside mainlan'. No deep water. Plenty mangrove--my word full up pigeon. Reef him little fella. Full up tit fish, calla-calla, mainlan' black. Fill'um up boat. Take'm alonga Thors'dilan'. Come back. Fill'm up one time more. Too much. Full up.” “The same old yarn. I've been all over that ground. There's no reef there, and if there had been it would have been found and skinned years ago,” said dogmatic Billy, with a sneer. “I see,” said Jim; “the season's over as far as you are concerned. You can go where you like. I'm sick of it now.” TROPIC DAYS