Alvin solved the problem by picking up both the half-filled jars by the lip and putting them on Arthur's shoulders. Then Alvin picked up the two full ones and hoisted them onto his own shoulders.

"Well, don't you make it look easy," said Arthur Stuart.

"I can't help it that I've got the grip and the heft of a blacksmith," said Alvin. "I earned them the hard way-you could do it too, if you wanted."

"I haven't heard you offering to make me no apprentice blacksmith."

"Because you're an apprentice maker, and not doing too bad at it."

"Did you heal the woman?"

"Not really. But I healed some of the damage the disease did."

"Meaning she can run a mile without panting, right?"

"Where she lives, it's more like splash a couple of dozen yards. That mud looked like it could swallow up whole armies and spit them back out as skeeters."

"Well, you done what you could, and we're done with it," said Arthur Stuart.

They got back to the house of Squirrel and Moose and poured the water into the cistern. Mixed in with what they already had, the cleaned water improved the quality only a little, but that was fine with Alvin. People kept overreacting. He was just a fellow using his knack.

Back at the house of Dead Mary-or Marie d'Espoir-nobody was following Alvin's advice. The woman he had saved was outside checking crawfish traps, getting bitten by skeeter after skeeter. She didn't mind anymore-in a swamp full of gators and cottonmouths, what was a little itching and a few dozen welts?

Meanwhile, the skeeters, engorged with her blood, spread out over the swamp. Some of them ended up in the city, and each person they bit ended up with a virulent dose of yellow fever growing in their blood.

3

Fever

SUPPER THAT EVENING was bedlam, the children moving in and out of the kitchen in shifts with the normal amount of shoving and jostling and complaining.