s the astonishing quickness with which this germ
destroyed human beings, and the fact that it inevitably killed any
human body it entered. No one ever recovered. There was the old Asiatic
cholera, when you might eat dinner with a well man in the evening, and
the next morning, if you got up early enough, you would see him being
hauled by your window in the death-cart. But this new plague was quicker
than that--much quicker.

[Illustration: But this new plague was quicker 078]

"From the moment of the first signs of it, a man would be dead in an
hour. Some lasted for several hours. Many died within ten or fifteen
minutes of the appearance of the first signs.

"The heart began to beat faster and the heat of the body to increase.
Then came the scarlet rash, spreading like wildfire over the face and
body. Most persons never noticed the increase in heat and heart-beat,
and the first they knew was when the scarlet rash came out. Usually,
they had convulsions at the time of the appearance of the rash. But
these convulsions did not last long and were not very severe. If one
lived through them, he became perfectly quiet, and only did he feel a
numbness swiftly creeping up his body from the feet. The heels became
numb first, then the legs, and hips, and when the numbness reached
as high as his heart he died. They did not rave or sleep. Their minds
always remained cool and calm up to the moment their heart numbed and
stopped. And another strange thing was the rapidity of decomposition. No
sooner was a person dead than the body seemed to fall to pieces, to
fly apart, to melt away even as you looked at it. That was one of the
reasons the plague spread so rapidly. All the billions of germs in a
corpse were so immediately released.

"And it was because of all this that the bacteriologists had so little
chance in fighting the germs. They were killed in their laboratories
even as they studied the germ of the Scarlet Death. They were heroes.
As fast as they perished, others stepped forth and took their places.
It was in London that they first isolated it. The news was telegraphed
everywhere. Trask was the name of the man who succeeded in this, but
within thirty hours he was dead. Then came the struggle in all the
laboratories to find something that would kill the plague germs. All
drugs failed. You see, the problem was to get a drug, or serum, that
would kill the germs in the body and not kill the body. They tried to
fight it with oth