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hundred—almost never less than twenty out of every hundred. It would be murder! But that is where the strong moral nature of Walter Reed came to help him. Here was a blameless man, a Christian man, and a man—though he was mild—who was mad to help his fellow men. And if you could prove that yellow fever was only carried by mosquitoes. . . .

So, on one hot night after a day among dying men at Pinar del Rio, he faced his Commission: "If the members of the Commission take the risk first—if they let themselves be bitten by mosquitoes that have fed on yellow fever cases, that will set an example to American soldiers, and then—" Reed looked at Lazear, and then at James Carroll.

"I am ready to take a bite," said Jesse Lazear, who had a wife and two small children.

"You can count on me, sir," said James Carroll, whose total assets were his searcher's brain, and his miserable pay as an assistant-surgeon in the army. (His liabilities were a wife and five children.)

Then Walter Reed (he had been called home to Washington to make a report on work done in the Spanish War) gave elaborate instructions to Carroll and Lazear and Agramonte. They were secret instructions, and savage instructions, when you consider the mild man he was. It was an immoral business—it was a breach of discipline in its way, for Walter Reed then had no permission from the high military authorities to start it. So Reed left for Washington, and Lazear and Carroll set off on the wildest, most daring journey any two microbe hunters had ever taken. Lazear? You could not see the doom in his eyes—the gleam of the searcher outshone it. Carroll? That was a soldier who cared no damn for death or courts-martial— Carroll was a microbe hunter of the great line. . . .

Lazear went down between the rows of beds on which lay men, doomed men with faces yellow as the leaves of autumn,