The Big Three drew a certain love from him. They were men. They rang true. They had trusted him and been lenient in regard to his tender-heartedness in the case of the little spy. Nifton Bend had been splendid about that.... Romney never ceased to wonder that three wise men in the desert had not agreed with him about the spy’s death being an atrocity, or about the questionableness of the sacrifice of Japan for the greater good of Asia. Perhaps it was his own limitation, that he considered so strongly the personal side in all things. Perhaps a man impassioned with the glory of the future, who reckons not with the lives of his brothers, his enemies or himself in order to promote his dream of coming days into action, has the greater human heart. Now the picture of the Island of Pestilence took sharper form and clearer colour. It literally hurtled into his mind.... They would have sent him to Japan had it not been for his delay in the Chinese police-station. Doubtless that mission concerned the Chinese agents there. The myriad Chinese working in the Japanese financial world were possibly lined up in the cause he had touched; perhaps they were bound together in Young China’s system. They would have to leave Japan in case of war, but their work might be done before they left.... There was nothing missing from Romney’s idea of the plot to end war in the world by making it too hideous even for the militarists. His present conception covered every fact. Each part fitted perfectly. He saw it far more clearly than when he outlined the form of it to the sages of the Gobi.... Ti Kung, working in the laboratories of the West, had brought back methods of producing and propagating the cultures of all the plagues. Perhaps the packet Ti Kung had thrust upon him, to carry from Shanghai to Minglapo, had contained directions for producing certain cultures, or added information for spreading the most loathsome infections.