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"Young man!"—the face of the Director-General of the British Army Medical Service changed from an irritated red to an indignant mauve-color—"young man, I will send you to India, I will send you to Zanzibar, I will send you to Timbuctoo—I will send you anywhere I please"—(the majestic old gentleman was shouting now, and his face was a positively furious purple) "but you may be damned sure I shall not send you to Natal! . . ." Reverberations. . . .

What could David Bruce do, but salute, and withdraw from his Presence? He had schemed, he had begged, and pulled wires, finally he had dared the anger of this Jupiter, so that he might go hunt microbes in South Africa. It was in the early eighteen nineties; Theobald Smith, in America, had just made that revolutionary jump ahead in microbe hunting—he had just shown how death may be carried by a tick, and only by a tick, from one animal to another. And now this David Bruce, physically as adventurous as Theobald Smith was mildly professorial, wanted to turn that corner after Smith. . . . Africa swarmed with mysterious viruses that made the continent a hell to live in; in the olive-green mimosa thickets and the jungle hummed and sizzled a hundred kinds of flies and ticks and gnats. . . . What a place for discoveries, for swashbuckling microscopings and lone-wolf bug-huntings Africa must be!

It was in the nature of David Bruce to do things his superiors

and elders didn't want him to do. Just out of medical school