night and eighty-one ships followed
her into the astonished sea.

While the damaged parts of the _Mamise_ were remade, Davidge pushed
the work on other portions of the ship's anatomy, so that when at
length she was ready for the dip she was farther advanced than steel
ships usually are before they are first let into the sea.

Her upper works were well along, her funnel was in, and her mast and
bridge. She looked from a distance like a ship that had run ashore.

There was keen rivalry among the building-crews of the ships that grew
alongside the _Mamise_, and each gang strove to put its boat overboard
in record time. The "Mamisers," as they called themselves, fought
against time and trouble to redeem her from the "jinx" that had set
her back again and again. During the last few days the heat was
furious and the hot plates made an inferno of the work. Then an icy
rain set in. The workers would not stop for mean weather, hot or
cold.

Mamise, the rivet-passer, stood to her task in a continual shower-bath.
The furnace was sheltered, but the hot rivets must be passed across
the rain curtain. Sutton urged her to lay off and give way to Snotty
or somebody whose health didn't matter a damn. Davidge ordered her
home, but her pride in her sex and her zest for her ship kept her at
work.

And then suddenly she sneezed!

She sneezed again and again helplessly, and she was stricken with a
great fear. For in that day a sneeze was not merely the little
explosion of tickled surfaces or a forewarning of a slight cold. It
was the alarum of the new Great Death, the ravening lion under the
sheep's wool of influenza.

The world that had seen the ancient horror of famine come stalking
back from the Dark Ages trembled now before the plague. The influenza
swept the world with recurrent violences.

Men who had feared to go to the trenches were snatched from their
offices and from their homes. Men who had tried in vain to get into
the fight died in their beds. Women and children perished innumerably.
Hearse-horses were overworked. The mysterious, invisible all-enemy did
not spare the soldiers; it sought them in the dugouts, among the
reserves, at the ports of embarkation and debarkation, at the
training-camps. In the hospitals it slew the convalescent wounded and
killed the nurses.

From America the influenza took more lives than the war itself.

It baffled science and carried off the doctors. Masks appeared and
people in offices we