no fear of the sort of death befitting a fighter--sudden
and violent--but a deep repugnance for those two assassins against which
a victim could not fight back--disease and poison. The Brazilian youth's
nonchalant fatalism aroused him to the fact that here both those forms
of death were very near him; the one in the air, the other on the
ground--fever and snakes.

For the moment he was depressed. Then curiosity awoke.

"If this here, now, Javary fever ain't catchin', how does a feller git
it?"

"Mosquitoes," McKay enlightened him. "The _anopheles_. It bites a man
who has fever, then bites a well man and leaves the fever in him. Inside
of ten days he's sick, unless he takes a huge dose of quinine right
away. Mosquito attacks perpendicular to the skin. That is, it stands on
its head. If you ever notice one of them biting that way get busy with
the quinine."

"Huh! Fat chance a feller's got o' seein' just how all these bugs bite
him. And one muskeeter standin' on its head does all that, hey?"

"So they say. Also they say it's only the female that bites."

"Yeah. I believe it. I been stung more 'n once by females before now.
How about the yeller fever? Git that the same way?"

"Same way, only a different mosquito--the _stegomyia_. When you begin to
vomit black you're gone. And if you get beriberi you're gone, too. First
symptoms of that are numbness of the fingers and toes. Muscular
paralysis goes on until your heart stops."

"Uh-huh. Nice cheerful place to die in, this Ammyzon jungle. Aw well,
what's the odds?"

Wherewith he inhaled more coffee, flipped his cigarette butt at a small
lizard on the floor not far away, yawned once more, and swaggered out to
the piazza, bawling:

"And when I die
Don't bury me a-tall,
But pickle me bones
In alky-hawl--"

When his roar had subsided and the two former officers had sat silent a
moment, smiling over his nocturnal adventures, the door of Schwandorf's
room opened abruptly and the German stepped out.

"_Morgen_," he grunted, striding to the table. "Thomaz!"

"_Si_, Senhor Sssondoff." The youth faded away into the kitchen
quarters.

"Always feel grumpy until I eat," grumbled the blackbeard. "None of this
coffee-cigarette breakfast for me. A real meal, coffee with gin in it, a
cigar--then I feel human. Sleep well?"

His bold gaze never flickered as it encountered Knowlton's.

"Fine. If you snored I didn't know it. Didn't hear the bodies taken ou