July and the first of August were two months of hot but strenuous waiting. Smith, with a Government bug-expert named Cooper Curtice, kept himself busy with vast studies of the lives and works and ways of ticks. They discovered how a six-legged baby tick climbs up onto a cow, how it fastens itself to the cow’s hide, begins to suck blood, sheds its skin, proudly acquires two more legs, sheds its skin again; they found out the eight-legged females then marry (on the cow’s back) each of them a little male, how the lady-ticks then have great feasts of blood, grow to tick womanhood--and at last drop off the cow to the ground to lay their two thousand or more eggs; so, hardly more than twenty days after their journey up the leg of the cow, their mission in life is done, and they shrivel up and die--while strange doings begin in each of those two thousand eggs.... Meanwhile, every day--it was a relief to get out of that cockroachy attic even to those burning fields--Theobald Smith journeyed out to his open air laboratory where Kilborne the future hardware dealer was in command. He went to Field No. 1 to see if ticks had got on to any of the northern cattle yet, to see if they were getting hot, if their heads drooped; he crossed over to Field No. 2 to pick a few more ticks off those three North Carolina cows--a few new ones always seemed to be popping up, grown from ones too small to see that first day!--it was nervous business, making sure those three cows stayed clean of ticks.... It was, to tell the truth, a perspiring and not too interesting waiting until that day a little past the middle of August, when the first northern cow began to show ticks, and presently to stand with her back arched, refusing to eat. Then the ticks appeared on all the northerners; they burned with fever, their blood turned to water, their ribs stuck out and their flanks grew bony--and ticks? They seemed to be alive with ticks! But on Field No. 2, where there were no ticks, the northern cows stayed as healthy as their North Carolina mates....