“Of contracting the contagion,” the other corrected smoothly.

“Call it what you will.  The public—­”

“Poppycock,” said Walter Merritt Emory.  “What you don’t know about leprosy, and what the rest of the board of health doesn’t know about leprosy, would fill more books than have been compiled by the men who have expertly studied the disease.  The one thing they have eternally tried, and are eternally trying, is to inoculate one animal outside man with the leprosy that is peculiar to man.  Horses, rabbits, rats, donkeys, monkeys, mice, and dogs—­heavens, they have tried it on them all, tens of thousands of times and a hundred thousand times ten thousand times, and never a successful inoculation!  They have never succeeded in inoculating it on one man from another.  Here—­let me show you.”

And from his shelves Waiter Merritt Emory began pulling down his authorities.

“Amazing . . . most interesting . . . " Doctor Masters continued to emit from time to time as he followed the expert guidance of the other through the books.  “I never dreamed . . . the amount of work they have done is astounding . . . "

“But,” he said in conclusion, “there is no convincing a layman of the matter contained on your shelves.  Nor can I so convince my public.  Nor will I try to.  Besides, the man is consigned to the living death of life-long imprisonment in the pest-house.  You know the beastly hole it is.  He loves the dog.  He’s mad over it.  Let him have it.  I tell you it’s rotten unfair and cruel, and I won’t stand for it.”

“Yes, you will,” Walter Merritt Emory assured him coolly.  “And I’ll tell you why.”

He told him.  He said things that no doctor should say to another, but which a politician may well say, and has often said, to another politician—­things which cannot bear repeating, if, for no other reason, because they are too humiliating and too little conducive to pride for the average American citizen to know; things of the inside, secret governments of imperial municipalities which the average American citizen, voting free as a king at the polls, fondly thinks he manages; things which are, on rare occasion, partly unburied and promptly reburied in the tomes of reports of Lexow Committees and Federal Commissions.

* * * * *

And Walter Merritt Emory won his desire of Michael against Doctor Masters; had his wife dine with him at Jules’ that evening and took her to see Margaret Anglin in celebration of the victory; returned home at one in the morning, in his pyjamas went out to take a last look at Michael, and found no Michael.

* * * * *

The pest-house of San Francisco, as is naturally the case with pest-houses in all American cities, was situated on the bleakest, remotest, forlornest, cheapest space of land owned by the city.  Poorly protected from the Pacific Ocean, chill winds and dense fog-banks whistled and swirled sadly across the sand-dunes.  Picnicking parties never came there, nor did small boys hunting birds’ nests or playing at being wild Indians.  The only class of frequenters was the suicides, who, sad of life, sought the saddest landscape as a fitting scene in which to end.  And, because they so ended, they never repeated their visits.