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, delirious men with bloodshot eyes. He bit those men with his silver-striped she-mosquitoes; carefully he carried these blood-filled beasts back to their glass homes, in which were little saucers of water and little lumps of sugar. Here the she-mosquitoes digested their meal of yellow fever blood, and buzzed a little, and waited for the test. “We should remember malaria,” Reed had told Lazear and Carroll. “In that disease it takes two or three weeks for the mosquito to become dangerous--maybe it’s the same here.” But look at the bold face of Jesse Lazear, and tell me if that was a patient man! Not he. Somehow he collected seven volunteers, who so far as I can find have remained nameless, since the test was done in dark secrecy. To these seven men--whom for all I know he may have shanghaied--but first of all to himself, Lazear applied those mosquitoes who a few days before had fed on men who now were dead.... But alas, they all stayed fit as fiddles, and that discouraged Lazear. But there was James Carroll. For years he had been the right-hand man of Walter Reed. He had come into the army as a buck private and had been a corporal and a sergeant for years--obeying orders was burned into his very bones--and Major Reed had said: “Try mosquitoes!” What is more, what Major Reed thought was right, James Carroll thought was right, too, and Major Reed thought there was something in the notion of that Old Theorizing Fool. But in the army, thoughts are secondary--Major Reed had left them saying: “Try mosquitoes!” So James Carroll reminded the discouraged Lazear: “I am ready!” He told Lazear to bring out the most dangerous mosquito in his collection--not one that had bitten only a single case, but he must use a mosquito that had bitten many cases--and they must be bad cases--of yellow fever. That mosquito must be as dangerous as possible! On the twenty-seventh of August, Jesse Lazear picked out what he thought to be his champion mosquito, and this creature, which had fed on four cases of yellow fever, two of them severe ones, settled down on the arm of James Carroll.