“Now it is my turn to take the bite!” said Walter Reed, but he was fifty years old, and they persuaded him not to. “But we _must_ prove it!” he insisted, so gently, that, hearing his musical voice and looking at his chin that did not stick out like the chin of a he-man, you might think Walter Reed was wavering (after all, here was one man dead out of three). “But we must prove it,” said that soft voice, and Reed went to General Leonard Wood, and told him the exciting events that had happened. Who could be less of a mollycoddle than this Wood? And he gave Walter Reed permission to go as far as he liked. He gave him money to build a camp of seven tents and two little houses--to say nothing of a flagpole--but what was best of all Wood gave him money to buy men, who would get handsomely paid for taking a sure one chance out of five of never having a chance to spend that money! So Walter Reed said: “Thank you, General,” and one mile from Quemados they pitched seven tents and raised a flagpole, and flew an American flag and called that place Camp Lazear (three cheers for Lazear!), and you will see what glorious things occurred there. Now, nothing is more sure than this: that every man of the great line of microbe hunters is different from every other man of them, but every man Jack of them has one thing in common: they are original. They were all original, excepting Walter Reed--whom you cannot say would be shot for his originality, seeing that this business of mosquitoes and various bugs and ticks carrying diseases was very much in the air in those last ten years of the nineteenth century. It was natural for a man to think of that! But he was by all odds the most moral of the great line of microbe hunters--aside from being a very thorough clean-cut experimenter--and now that Walter Reed’s moral nature told him: “You must kill men to save them!” he set out to plan a series of air-tight tests--never was there a good man who thought of more hellish and dastardly tests! And he was exact. Every man about to be bit by a mosquito must stay locked up for days and days and weeks, in that sunbaked Camp Lazear--to keep him away from all danger of accidental contact with yellow fever. There would be no catch in these experiments! And then Walter Reed let it be known, to the American soldiers in Cuba, that there was another war on, a war for the saving of men--were there men who would volunteer? Before the ink was dry on the announcements Private Kissenger of Ohio stepped into his office, and with him came John J. Moran, who wasn’t even a soldier--he was a civilian clerk in the office of General Fitzhugh Lee. “You can try it on us, sir!” they told him. Walter Reed was a thoroughly conscientious man. “But, men, do you realize the danger?” And he told them of the headaches and the hiccups and the black vomit--and he told them of fearful epidemics in which not a man had lived to carry news or tell the horrors....