Page:James Hopper--Caybigan.djvu/117

Rh face, and these big black eyes became a measure of the road that Burke had travelled the last three years, a road he liked not to contemplate. So he was turning from the unpleasant scene when the boy let go the tail and fell back, rigid.

Burke looked down upon the stark little form with a frown of perplexity and distrust. He slid himself along the bulwark till a few feet away, then ran his eyes up along the mainmast.

At the peak, a yellow flag was smacking in the wind.

His eyes dropped to the boxes on the quay. They were coffins.

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