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hunting microbes—Walter Reed had qualifications. He was the best of soldiers; fourteen years and more he had served on the western plains and mountains; he had been a brave angel flying through blizzards to the bedsides of sick settlers—he had shunned the dangers of beer and bottle-pool in the officers' mess and resisted the seductions of alcoholic nights at draw poker. He had a strong moral nature. He was gentle. But it will take a genius to dig out this microbe of the yellow jack, you say—and are geniuses gentle? Just the same, you will see that this job needed particularly a strong moral nature, and then, besides, since 1891 Walter Reed had been doing a bit of microbe hunting. He had done some odd jobs of searching at the very best medical school under the most eminent professor of microbe hunting in America—and that professor had known Robert Koch, intimately.

So Walter Reed came to Quemados, and as he went into the yellow fever hospital there, more than enough young American soldiers passed him, going out, on their backs, feet first. . . . There were going to be plenty of cases to work on all right—fatal cases! Dr. James Carroll was with Walter Reed, and he was not what you would call gentle, but you will see in a moment what a soldier-searcher James Carroll was. And Reed found Jesse Lazear waiting for him—Lazear was a European-trained microbe hunter, aged thirty-four, with a wife and two babies in the States, and with doom in his eyes. Finally there was Aristides Agramonte (who was a Cuban)—it was to be his job to cut up the dead bodies, and very well he did that job, though he never became famous because he had had yellow fever already and so ran no risks. These four were the Yellow Fever Commission.

The first thing the Commission did was to fail to find any microbe whatever in the first eighteen cases of yellow fever that they probed into. There were many severe cases in those eighteen; there were four of those eighteen cases who died; there was not one of those eighteen cases that they didn't claw through from stem to gudgeon, so to speak, drawing blood,