Next day I was called to the office of His Honor, the Sindico of Mochis, and was surprised by a captain’s tap on my shoulder. I was under arrest. It was a long trip toward the death-house. They jailed me first at Mochis, where I managed to have three words with Meade Lewis, a little red-headed friend of mine who was American consul. I told him what I guessed: I was booked to be shot because one of Obregón’s most valued officers had died after my operation.
My tumbrel to Topolobampo was a track car, bristling with rifles; half the population and their dogs tagged along for a look at the gringo who was going to be tried—which was a synonym for being executed. I had been allowed one glance at Eloisa and our baby. The cell in which I spent ten days was a Yaqui butcher shop when it wasn’t occupied by the condemned. Into a fragrance of spoiled meat my jailor came at last to inform me that the trial and shooting were set for Saturday morning. And here it was Friday.
On Saturday morning I had prepared my sinful Methodist-born soul for a stern hereafter, when the officer in command swung wide the door, saluted deferentially and proclaimed, “Doctor, you are free!”
Not until I had rejoined my family did I learn what this, or anything else, was about. I had become an international affair, they said. Consul Meade Lewis had fairly pulled the cables loose between Topolobampo and Washington. William Jennings Bryan had sent a cruiser down from San Diego. The captain of that cruiser burned the wires to Mexico City with a Richard Harding Davis sort of message: “Release Lambert at once or I’m coming to get him.”
It made a ripping newspaper story. Away up in Newark my brother Fred had been visiting some Mexican friends who told him how wonderfully I was doing in Mochis. After the party Fred passed a subway newsstand and saw the black headline, “JAIL DOOR SWINGS WIDE FOR LAMBERT.” He was proud of the family when he read how William Jennings Bryan had taken steps.
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I have jotted down these few facts about myself so that my readers may try to decide how well experience had equipped me to be an international health physician. I hope they’re not as unsure as I was that day in September, 1918, when I put my family aboard the train for our first long pull toward Papua.
CHAPTER II
BY THE RAM’S HORN ROUTE
It was early May, 1920, before I saw the sterile hills and corrugated iron roofs of Papua’s capital, Port Moresby. As they traveled in those days it would have taken the ordinary voyager six weeks from San Francisco. I was no ordinary voyager, it turned out. The little stopover in North Queensland, which Dr. Heiser had suggested for me, held me there a year and a half in one of the most strenuous hookworm campaigns in the history of the parasite. The minute I saw Dr. Waite, who was our chief worker there, I was shocked by the picture of what the tropics can do to a man engaged in the benevolent business of public health. Malaria had yellowed his skin, and a horrid fungus called “sprue” had ravaged him so that he was going home to die. He didn’t die; but I did very nearly, of the same foul blight that lays bare a man’s intestinal tract from mouth to anus.