That soldier watched her while she felt around with her stinger.... What did he think as he watched her swell into a bright balloon with his blood? Nobody knows. But he could think, what everybody knows: “I am forty-six years old, and in yellow fever the older the fewer--get better.” He was forty-six years old. He had a wife and five children, but that evening James Carroll wrote to Walter Reed: “If there is anything in the mosquito theory, I should get a good dose of yellow fever!” He did. Two days later he felt tired and didn’t want to visit patients in the yellow fever ward. Two days after that he was really sick: “I must have malaria!” he cried, and went to the laboratory under his own power, to squint at his own blood under the microscope. But no malaria. That night his eyes were bloodshot, his face a dusky red. The next morning Lazear packed Carroll off to the yellow fever wards, and there he lay, near to death for days and days.... There was one minute when he thought his heart had stopped ... and that, as you will see, was a bad minute for Assistant-Surgeon Carroll. He always said those were the proudest days of his life. “I was the first case to come down with yellow fever after the experimental bite of a mosquito!” said Carroll. Then there was that American private soldier they called “X.Y.”--these outlaw searchers called him “X.Y.,” though he was really William Dean, of Grand Rapids, Michigan. While James Carroll was having his first headaches, they bit this X.Y. with four mosquitoes--the one that nearly killed Carroll, and then three other silver-striped beauties besides, who had fed on six men that were fairly sick, and four men that were very sick with yellow fever and two men that died.