n, the hopeless struggle against the covert odds.
With nothing behind: no support from the Government, no adequate
supplies, few capable men; and all the time the dead, inert,
dust-powdered air; the offices of policeman, doctor, apothecary, even
undertaker and gravedigger, to perform; and the endless weeks of it
all. A handful of good men under two leaders of nerve, conscience and
ability, to fight an invisible enemy, which, gaining headway, would
destroy its scores of thousands!

At the end of the first two months Fielding Bey became hopeless.

"We can't throttle it," he said to Dicky Donovan. "They don't give us
the ghost of a chance. To-day I found a dead-un hid in an oven under a
heap of flour to be used for to-morrow's baking; I found another doubled
up in a cupboard, and another under a pile of dourha which will be
ground into flour."

"With twenty ghaffirs I beat five cane and dourha fields this morning,"
said Dicky. "Found three cases. They'd been taken out of the village
during the night."

"Bad ones?"

"So so. They'll be worse before they're better. That was my morning's
flutter. This afternoon I found the huts these gentlemen call their
homes. I knocked holes in the roofs per usual, burnt everything that
wasn't wood, let in the light o' heaven, and splashed about limewash and
perchloride. That's my day's tot-up. Any particular trouble?" he added,
eyeing Fielding closely.

Fielding fretfully jerked his foot on the floor, and lighted his pipe,
the first that day.

"Heaps. I've put the barber in prison, and given the sarraf twenty
lashes for certifying that the death of the son of the Mamour was el
aadah--the ordinary. It was one of the worst cases I've ever seen. He
fell ill at ten and was dead at two, the permis d'inhumation was given
at four, and the usual thing occurred: the bodywashers got the bedding
and clothing, and the others the coverlet. God only knows who'll wear
that clothing, who'll sleep in that bed!"

"If the Lord would only send them sense, we'd supply sublimate
solution--douche and spray, and zinc for their little long boxes of
bones," mused Dicky, his eyes half shut, as he turned over in his hands
some scarabs a place-hunting official had brought him that day. "Well,
that isn't all?" he added, with a quick upward glance and a quizzical
smile. His eyes, however, as they fell on Fielding's, softened in a
peculiar way, and a troubled look flashed through them; for Fielding's
face was d