Now everything was fine with the experiments of Quemados. Eight men had been bitten, it is true, and were fit as fiddles--but the last two, James Carroll and X.Y., they were real experimental guinea-pigs, those two, they had both got yellow fever--and James Carroll’s heart had nearly stopped, but now they were both getting better, and Carroll was on the heights, writing to Walter Reed, waiting proudly for his chief to come back--to show him the records. Only Jesse Lazear was a little cynical about these two cases, because Lazear was a fine experimenter, a tight one, a man who had to have every condition just so, like a real searcher--and, thought Lazear, “It is too bad seeing the nerve of Carroll and X.Y.--but both of them exposed themselves in dangerous zones once or twice, before they came down. It wasn’t an absolutely perfect experiment--it isn’t sure that _my_ mosquitoes gave them yellow fever!” So Lazear was skeptical, but orders were orders, and every afternoon he went to those rows of beds at Las Animas, in the room with the faint strange smell, and here he turned his test-tubes upside-down on the arms of boys with bloodshot eyes, and let his she-mosquitoes suck their fill. But September 13th was a bad day, it was an unlucky day for Jesse Lazear, for while he was at this silly job of feeding his mosquitoes, a stray mosquito settled down on the back of his hand. “Oh! that’s nothing!” he thought. “That wouldn’t be the right kind of mosquito anyway!” he muttered, and he let the mosquito drink her fill--though, mind you, she was a stray beast that lived in this ward where men were dying! That was September 13th. “On the evening of September 18th ... Dr. Lazear complained of feeling out of sorts, and had a chill at 8 P.M.,” says a hospital record of Las Animas.... “September 19: Twelve o’clock noon,” goes on that laconic record, “temperature 102.4 degrees, pulse 112. Eyes injected, face suffused. [That means bloodshot and red] ... 6 P.M. temperature 103.8 degrees, pulse, 106. Jaundice appeared on the third day. The subsequent history of this case was one of progressive and fatal yellow fever” [and the record softens a little], “the death of our lamented colleague having occurred on the evening of September 25, 1900.” IV Then Reed came back to Cuba, and Carroll met him with enthusiasm, and Walter Reed was sad for Lazear, but very happy about those two successful cases of Carroll and X.Y.--and then, and then (brushing aside tears for Lazear) even in that there was the Hand of God, there was something for Science: “As Dr. Lazear was bitten by a mosquito while present in the wards of a yellow fever hospital,” wrote Walter Reed, “one must, at least, admit the possibility of this insect’s contamination by a previous bite of a yellow fever patient. This case of accidental infection therefore _cannot fail to be of interest_....”