side the writhing sailor, I saw the
metal crucifix nearly fall from his thin hands through sheer weakness.
He was the Portuguese bishop from down-coast of course, and when I
remembered that he had just been through black-water fever (which is own
brother to yellow jack) I judged that from a human point of view he was
behaving with exquisite foolishness in meddling with first-crop cholera
patients. But I respected him a good deal for all that, and went and got
opium and acetate of lead and gave the man on the hatch a swingeing
dose. It was a useless thing to do, because the chap had got to die, and
one incurred one's own risks by going near him; but if that bishop was a
fool, I had got to be a fool too, and there was an end of it.

[Illustration: "HE KNELT BESIDE THE WRITHING SAILOR."]

Mark you, I wasn't feeling a bit frightened then. I'd been through
cholera-cramp in India, and knew what my chances were, and was ready to
face them without whimpering; though of course I'd freely have given
every farthing I was worth to have been snugly back in the Congo again.
But the thing had got to be seen through, and I intended to keep my end
up somehow. I couldn't afford to die like a rat in a squalid hole like
that.

I had breakfast all to myself that morning, because no one else turned
up; and afterwards the captain did me the honour to call me into
consultation. My Portuguese is off colour, but I speak enough to get
along with.

"You English know so much about these things," he said.

[Illustration: "'WE NO FIT FOR STOKE, SAR. WE GENTLEMEN WID MONEY,
SAR.'"]

"We keep clean ships," I answered, "and when anything goes wrong on them
we do not lose our heads. Also we try to trace our way back to the root
of evils. How did this plague start?"

"You must have brought it on board at Banana. We had not in the ship
before you came."

"We did not bring it. There is no cholera in the Congo now. And,
moreover, your passenger-boys are none of them sick. We must try back
further."

We did that together laboriously; and at last traced the mischief to
that fatal case of baccalhao which had been shipped at Bahia, an
infected port; and had this essence of pest promptly thrown to the
sharks. Next we went into the question of hands.

"I have not enough firemen and trimmers left to man a single watch,"
said the captain. "The cholera hit the stoke-hold first. The fellows who
are working there now have stood three watches on end, and th