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BRUCE

a bold everlastingly curious snouting hunter with his body too. If he had sat back and listened to those missionaries, or stayed listening to those bug experts—he would never have learned that Kivu was the Uganda name for the tsetse. He would never have found the tsetse. But he carried the fight to the enemy—and as for Mrs. Bruce, that woman was better than a third hand or two extra pairs of eyes for him.

Now they planned and did terrible experiments. Day after day they caused tsetse flies to feed on patients near to death (already too deep in sleep to be annoyed by the insects); they interrupted the flies in the midst of their meal, and put the angry, half-satisfied cages of them on the backs of monkeys. With all the tenderness of high-priced nurses watching over Park Avenue babies they saw to it that only their experimental flies, and no chance flies from outside, got a meal off those beasts. Other searchers might have rolled their thumbs waiting to see what happened to the monkeys, but not Bruce.

He proceeded to call in a strange gang of co-workers to help him in one of the most amazing tests of all microbe hunting. Bruce asked for an audience from the high-plumed gay-robed potentate, Apolo Kagwa, Prime Minister of Uganda. He told Apolo he had discovered the microbe of the sleeping death which was killing so many thousands of his people. He informed him many thousands more already had the parasite in their blood, and were doomed. "But there is a way to stop the ruin that faces your country, for I have reason to believe it is the tsetse fly—the insect you call Kivu—and only this insect, that carries the poisonous germ from a sick man to a healthy one—"

The magnificent Apolo broke in: "But I cannot believe that is so—Kivu has been on the Lake shore always, and my people have only begun to be taken by the sleeping sickness during the last few years—"

Bruce didn't argue. He bluffed, as follows: "If you do not believe me, give me a chance to prove it to you. Go down