Peking. He thinks the revolution of the Chinese against
the Manchu Government is going to be something far more serious
this time than a flutter of fans and a sputter of
shooting-crackers. The long-suffering worm with the head of a
dragon is going to turn, and when it does, there will not be a
Manchu left to tell the pig tale.

Jack is in Mukden now, where he is about to lose his mind with joy
over the prospect of looking straight in the eye--if it has
one--this wicked old germ with a new label, and telling it what he
thinks. The technical terms he gives are as paralyzing as a
Russian name spelled backwards.

In a day's time this fearful thing wipes out entire families and
villages. It has simply ravaged northern Manchuria and the country
about. Jack says so deadly are the effects of these germs in the
air that if a man walking along the street happens to breathe in
one, he is a corpse on the spot before he is through swallowing.
The remains are gathered up by men wearing shrouds and net masks,
and the peaceful Oriental who was not doing a thing hut attending
strictly to his own business, is soon reduced to ashes. All
because of a pesky microbe with a surplus of energy.

You know perfectly well, Mate, Jack does not speak in this
frivolous manner of his beloved work. The interpretation is wholly
mine. But I dare not be serious over it. I must push any thought
of his danger to the further ends of nowhere.

Jack thinks the native doctors have put up a brave fight, but so
far the laugh has been all on the side of the frisky germ.

It blasts everything it touches and is most fastidious. Nobody can
blame it for choosing as its nesting-place the little soft furred
Siberian marmots, which the Chinese hunt for their skin. If only
the hunters could be given a dip in a sulphur vat before they lay
them down to sleep in the unspeakable inns with their spoils
wrapped around them, the chance for infection would not be so
great. Of course the bare suggestion of a bath might prove more
fatal than the plague, for oftener than not the hunters are used
only as a method of travel by the merry microbe and are immune from
the effects. Of course Jack has all sorts of theories as to why
this is so. But did you ever see a scientist who didn't have a
workable theory for everything from the wrong end of a carpet-tack
to the evolution of a June bug?

From the hunters and their spoils the disease spreads and their
path southw