phage, one half untreated. In the badly afflicted districts, he might give the phage to every one, and if the disease slackened unusually, that would be a secondary proof.
Whether the St. Hubert government, since they had not asked for aid, would give Martin power to experiment and Sondelius police authority, the Trustees did not know. The Surgeon General, a chap named Inchcape Jones, had replied to their cables: "No real epidemic not need help." But McGurk promised that he would pull his numerous wires to have the McGurk Commission (Chairman, Martin Arrowsmith, B.A., M.D.) welcomed by the authorities.
Sondelius still insisted that in this crisis mere experimentation was heartless, yet he listened to Martin's close-reasoned fury with the enthusiasm which this bull-necked eternal child had for anything which sounded new and preferably true. He did not, like Almus Pickerbaugh, regard a difference of scientific opinion as an attack on his character.
He talked of going on his own, independent of Martin and McGurk, but he was won back when the Trustees murmured that though they really did wish the dear man wouldn't fool with sera, they would provide him with apparatus to kill all the rats he wanted.
Then Sondelius was happy:
"And you watch me! I am the captain-general of rat-killers! I yoost walk into a warehouse and the rats say, 'There's that damn' old Uncle Gustaf—what's the use?' and they turn up their toes and die! I am yoost as glad I have you people behind me, because I am broke—I went and bought some oil stock that don't look so good now—and I shall need a lot of hydrocyanic acid gas. Oh, those rats! You watch me! Now I go and telegraph I can't keep a lecture engagement next week—huh! me to lecture to a women's college, me that can talk rat-language and know seven beautiful deadly kind of traps!"
Martin had never known greater peril than swimming a flood as a hospital intern. From waking to midnight he was too busy making phage and receiving unsolicited advice from all the Institute staff to think of the dangers of a plague epidemic, but when he went to bed, when his brain was still revolving with
