He opened the unguarded door of the hall. An instant later he reeled back horror-stricken. Instead of a feasting gathering of officers attached to the Mongolian Staff he saw before a feast of men contorted in grotesque shapes by some violent death. Many lay beside the table, some on it, their faces blotched with great, unsightly wheals, their chests bloated until they seemed about to burst. Only one poor wretch had any life left in him--he lay exhausted on the floor with great streams of frothy mucous pouring from his nose and throat. A possibility dawned in Loomis' mind. He dashed away to search the other mess tents, shouting to his aides to follow suit. It was as he guessed: they had landed in a camp of dead and dying; stricken by some mysterious power. Hope suddenly surged back into his soul. He felt dizzy and faint. Could a similar fate have caused the unaccountable silence of the enemy's cannonade? Even as the thought came to him, he knew it must be so. His marvelous old friend, Dr. Rutledge, had risen to the need of the world and crushed the yellow menace. * * * * * Such, truly, had been the case. In a single hour, through the agency of a harmless food, the subtle scientist had crushed a nation. The principle involved had been discovered nearly two centuries before, when it was well-known that if an animal were injected with a small quantity of a protein foreign to his body, a subsequent dose a hundred million times as weak would cause its immediate and violent death. Even the quantity that might be flying in the atmosphere and become dissolved in the fluids of the nose or eyes would act as the most virulent of known poisons. Through the ages, however, the human race had more or less come in contact with all the proteins in their world and hence rarely became highly sensitized to any protein occurring in nature. The terrible toxicity of a protein which had never before occurred in nature and to whose power mankind had never been even partially desensitized had up to the time of Dr. Rutledge only entered the minds of a few scientists. His strategy was the working out of a new maxim: Nature is terrible, but man makes it more so. * * * * *