“I must tell you, I must,” he gasped. “Our mutual, our dear friend, Charles Thorold, was in here an hour ago. I had been called out for five minutes, but he said he would wait. As I had a patient in here, Gregory, my man, showed Thorold into the room upstairs—my laboratory. In an open box on the table were several little glass tubes containing bacilli—different sorts of bacilli that I’ve been cultivating. It seems that Charles, with fatal curiosity, picked up one of these tubes to examine it. The glass of the tube is very thin. One of them broke in his hand—ah! What catastrophe could be more complete? It’s terrible... horrible!” He stopped abruptly, unable to go on.
“Well? Why so terrible! Tell me!” I exclaimed.
He pulled himself together with an effort.
“That tube contained a cultivation of pneumonic plague,” he exclaimed huskily, “one of the deadliest microbes known. The blood-serum in which I had grown the germs fell upon his hands. Not suspecting the danger, he actually wiped it off with his handkerchief! I did not return until a quarter of an hour afterwards. The evil was then beyond remedy. He became infected!”
“Phew! What will happen now?”
“Happen? In a few days at most he will be dead! There are no recoveries from pneumonic plague—that most terrible contagious disease so well-known in Eastern Siberia and Japan. There is no hope for him. None. You hear—none!”
“By Gad!” I gasped, horrified. “You can’t mean it. Where is Thorold now?”
“In isolation at St. George’s hospital. I sent him there at once. Oh! Heaven, it is too terrible to think of—and my fault, all my fault for leaving the tube there!”
I tried to calm him, but he was quite beside himself.
I halted, astounded at the gravity of the situation.