"Humph! Sort of a reg'lar thing to die of fever here, hey?"
Thomaz shrugged as if hearing a foolish question.
"Si. Swamp fever, yellow fever, smallpox, beriberi—to-day we live, to-morrow we are dead."
"True for ye. They's allays somethin' hidin' round the corner waitin' to jump ye, no matter where ye are. If 'tain't one thing, it's another."
Despite his philosophical answer, however, Tim fell silent, his eyes going to the doors of the rooms where Death had stalked last night while he was gambling. Like most men in whose veins red blood runs bold and free, he had no fear of the sort of death befitting a fighter—sudden and violent—but a deep repugnance for those two assassins against which a victim could not fight back—disease and poison. The Brazilian youth's nonchalant fatalism aroused him to the fact that here both those forms of death were very near him; the one in the air, the other on the ground—fever and snakes.
For the moment he was depressed. Then curiosity awoke.
"If this here, now, Javary fever ain't catchin', how does a feller git it?"
"Mosquitoes," McKay enlightened him. "The anopheles. It bites a man who has fever, then bites a well man and leaves the fever in him. Inside of ten days he's sick, unless he takes a huge dose of quinine right away. Mosquito attacks perpendicular to the skin. That is, it stands on its head. If you ever notice one of them biting that way get busy with the quinine."
"Huh! Fat chance a feller's got o' seein' just how all these bugs bite him. And one muskeeter standin' on its head does all that, hey?"
"So they say. Also they say it's only the female that bites."