Page:Microbe Hunters.djvu/269

In a moment he pricked up his mental ears. "The farmers, the ones who lose the stock, who see most of Texas fever, they think that?"

Now, though Theobald Smith was born in a city, he liked the smell of hay just cut and the brown furrows of fresh-turned fields. There was something sage—something as near as you can come to truth for him in a farmer's clipped sentences about the crops or the weather. Smith was learned in the marvelous shorthand of mathematics; men of the soil don't know that stuff. He was absolutely at home among the scopes and tubes and charts of shining laboratories—in short, this young searcher was full of sophisticated wisdom that laughs at common sayings, that often jeers at peasant platitudes. But in spite of all of his learning (and this was an arbitrary strange thing about him!) Theobald Smith did not confuse fine buildings and complicated apparatus with clear thinking—he seemed always to be distrusting what he got out of books or what he saw in tubes. . . . He felt the dumbest yokel to be profoundly right when that fellow took his corn-cob pipe from his maybe unbrushed teeth to growl that April showers brought May flowers.

He listened to Kilborne's gossip about that idiotic theory of ticks; Kilborne told him the cattlemen of the West were pretty well agreed it was ticks. Well, pondered Smith, those fellows were surely innocent of any fancy reasoning to corrupt their brains, they reeked of the smell of steers and heifers, they were almost, you might say, a part of their animals; and they were the ones who had to lay awake nights knowing this dreadful disease was turning their cattle's blood to water, to taking the bread from their children's mouths. They had to bury those poor wasted beasts. And these experienced farmers one and all said: "No ticks—no Texas fever!"

Theobald Smith would follow the farmers. He would watch the disease as nearly as possible as those stockmen had watched it. Here was a new kind of microbe hunting—following nature, and changing her by just the smallest tricks. . . . The sum-