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BRUCE

that fly, a black-headed pin joined it. From the impressive Sekibobo down to the lowest fly-boy, Apolo's men had done their work with an automatic perfection. At last the red and black dots on the map showed that where there were tsetses, there was the sleeping death—and where there were no tsetses—there was no single case of sleeping sickness!

The job looked finished. The unhappy monkeys bit by the flies who had sucked the blood of dying negroes—these monkeys' mouths fell open while they tried to eat their beloved bananas; they went to sleep and died. Other monkeys never bit by flies—but kept in the same cages, eating out of the same dishes—those monkeys never showed a sign of the disease. Here were experiments as clean, as pretty as the best ones Theobald Smith had made. . . .

VII

But now for action! Whatever of the dreamer and laboratory experimenter there was in him—and there was much—those creative parts of David Bruce went to sleep, or evaporated out of him; he became the surgeon of Ladysmith once more, and the rampageous shooter of lions and killer of koodoos. . . . To wipe out the sleeping sickness! That seemed the most brilliantly simple job now. Not that there weren't countless thousands of blacks with trypanosomes in their blood, and all these folks must die, of course; not that there weren't buzzing billions of tsetses singing their hellish tune on the Lake shore—but here was the point: Those flies lived only on the Lake shore! And if they had no more sleeping-sickness blood to suck, then. . . . And Apolo Kagwa was absolute Tsar of all Uganda . . . Apolo, Bruce knew, trusted him, adored him. . . .

Now to wipe sleeping sickness from the earth!

To conference with Bruce once more came Apolo and the Sekibobo and the lesser chiefs. Bruce told them the simple logic of what was to be done.