Suddenly His Excellency exclaimed, with a laugh:
"Your mission to Berlin has borne fruit, my dear Gregory! For the past four days I have been receiving terrible reports from Vologda, and worse from Nijni-Novgorod. The inhabitants have been seized by a mysterious and terribly fatal disease. A medical commission left Petrograd yesterday to study it."
"Let them study it!" laughed Rasputin. "They will discover no mode of treatment."
"Both towns are rapidly becoming decimated. There have been over thirty thousand deaths, and the mortality is daily increasing."
"As I expected," remarked the monk. "The professor knows what he is doing. Later on we shall be sending the infection into England and cause our John Bull friends a surprise."
"But the position is terribly serious," said His Excellency.
"No doubt. Berlin is watching the result. One day they may deem it wise to infect our army. But that must be left to their discretion."
Truly the result of that devilish plot was most awful. In the three months that followed—though not a word leaked out to the Allies, so careful were Protopopoff and the camarilla to suppress all the facts—more than half the population of the two cities died from a disease which to this day is a complete mystery, and its bacilli known only to German bacteriologists.
