According to Elias M. Pierce, no mean judge of men, there was nothing to worry about in that direction. That snake, he considered, was scotched. It might take time for said snake, who was a young snake with a head full of poison (his uncomplimentary metaphor referred, I need hardly state, to Mr. Harrington Surtaine), to come to his serpentine senses; but in the end he must realize that he was caught. The committee wasn't so smugly satisfied. Time was going on and there was no word, one way or the other, from the "Clarion" office. Inside that office more was stirring than the head of it knew about. On a warmish day, McGuire Ellis, seated at his open window, had permitted the bland air of early June to lull him to a nap, which was rudely interrupted by the intrusion of a harsh point amongst his waistcoat buttons. Stumbling hastily to his feet he confronted Dr. Miles Elliot. "Wassamatter?" he demanded, in the thick tones of interrupted sleep. "What are you poking me in the ribs for?" "McBurney's point," observed the visitor agreeably. "Now, if you had appendicitis, you'd have yelped. You haven't got appendicitis." "Much obliged," grumped Mr. Ellis. "Couldn't you tell me that without a cane?" "I spoke to you twice, but all you replied was 'Hoong!' As I speak only the Mandarin dialect of Chinese--" "Sit down," said Ellis, "and tell me what you're doing in this den of vice and crime." "Vice and crime is correct," confirmed the physician. "You're still curing cancer, consumption, corns, colds, and cramps in print, for blood money. I've come to report." McGuire Ellis stared. "What on?" "The Rookeries epidemic." "Quick work," the journalist congratulated him sarcastically. "The assignment is only a little over two months old." "Well, I might have guessed, any time in those two months, but I wanted to make certain." "_Are_ you certain?" "Reasonably." "What is it?" "Typhus." "What's that? Something like typhoid?" "It bears about the same relation to typhoid," said the Doctor, eyeing the other with solemnity, "as housemaid's knee does to sunstroke." "Well, don't get funny with me. I don't appreciate it. Is it very serious?" "Not more so than cholera," answered the Doctor gravely. "Hey! Then why aren't we all dead?" "Because it doesn't spread so rapidly. Not at first, anyway." "How does it spread? Come on! Open up!" "Probably by vermin. It's rare in this country. There was a small epidemic in New York in the early nineties. It was discovered early and confined to one tenement. There were sixty-three people in the tenement when they clapped on the quarantine. Thirty-two of 'em came out feet first. The only outside case was a reporter who got in and wrote a descriptive article. He died a week later." "Sounds as if this little affair of the Rookeries might be some story." "It is. There may have been fifty deaths to date; or maybe a hundred. We don't know." Ellis sat back in his chair with a bump. "Who's 'we'?"