“Sit down,” said Ellis, “and tell me what you’re doing in this den of vice and crime.”

“Vice and crime is correct,” confirmed the physician.  “You’re still curing cancer, consumption, corns, colds, and cramps in print, for blood money.  I’ve come to report.”

McGuire Ellis stared.  “What on?”

“The Rookeries epidemic.”

“Quick work,” the journalist congratulated him sarcastically.  “The assignment is only a little over two months old.”

“Well, I might have guessed, any time in those two months, but I wanted to make certain.”

“Are you certain?”

“Reasonably.”

“What is it?”

“Typhus.”

“What’s that?  Something like typhoid?”

“It bears about the same relation to typhoid,” said the Doctor, eyeing the other with solemnity, “as housemaid’s knee does to sunstroke.”

“Well, don’t get funny with me.  I don’t appreciate it.  Is it very serious?”

“Not more so than cholera,” answered the Doctor gravely.

“Hey!  Then why aren’t we all dead?”

“Because it doesn’t spread so rapidly.  Not at first, anyway.”

“How does it spread?  Come on!  Open up!”

“Probably by vermin.  It’s rare in this country.  There was a small epidemic in New York in the early nineties.  It was discovered early and confined to one tenement.  There were sixty-three people in the tenement when they clapped on the quarantine.  Thirty-two of ’em came out feet first.  The only outside case was a reporter who got in and wrote a descriptive article.  He died a week later.”

“Sounds as if this little affair of the Rookeries might be some story.”

“It is.  There may have been fifty deaths to date; or maybe a hundred.  We don’t know.”

Ellis sat back in his chair with a bump.  “Who’s ’we’?”

“Dr. Merritt and myself.”

“The Health Bureau is on, then.  What’s Merritt going to do about it?”

“What can he do?”

“Give out the whole thing, and quarantine the district.”

“The Mayor will remove him the instant he opens his mouth, and kill any quarantine.  Merritt will be discredited in all the papers—­unless the ‘Clarion’ backs him.  Will it?”

Ellis dropped his head in his hand.  “I don’t know,” he said finally.

“Not running an honest paper this week?” sneered the physician lightly.  “By the way, where’s Young Hopeful?”

“See here, Dr. Elliot,” said Ellis.  “You’re a good old scout.  If you hadn’t poked me in the stomach I believe I’d tell you something.”

“Try it,” encouraged the other.

“All right.  Here it is.  They’ve put it up to Hal Surtaine pretty stiff, this gang of perfectly honorable business men, leading citizens, pillars of the church, porch-climbers, and pickpockets who run the city.  I guess you know who I mean.”

Dr. Elliot permitted himself a reserved grin.