"What in the Lord's name is going on?" Lowell asked him.

"Our associate from next-door thought it wise to raise the hue and cry and bring on the whole neighborhood," Norton explained, still pale to the neck from their discovery. "The police have yet to arrive, but a priest and a team of bridge players have certainly made commendable timing!"

"The man deserves every inch of it," Lowell heard someone mutter, the speaker's identity washed away in safe anonymity by the general bustle, as Lowell steered Holmes through the throng. The doctor clutched his chamois-leather medical bag in front of his chest as his shield and armor.

"Good afternoon, doctor," the priest whispered confidentially to Holmes. "I would not expect too much. I've never seen anything like it. I'm afraid your patient is very ill - he is going to die."

"Yes," Holmes nodded, opening his bag on the ground and snapping on a pair of thin rubber gloves, "and he's going to hell, too."

"No, I have just given extreme unction - and you must not say such things!"

"Well, if you are to express a medical opinion, Reverend, I have as much right to a theological one. I don't plan to allow anyone to die to-day if it's all the same to you, so if you wish to help you can push your congregation out of the way."

Holmes removed a dozen compresses from his bag and began wrapping MacDonald's arms and legs.

MacDonald tried to speak but could only whisper. Holmes saw that the scabs had spread to the underside of MacDonald's mouth and had turned the man's tongue into a blob of puss.

"Just nod if you understand me, Mr. MacDonald. Good then. These towels have menthol on them, that will soothe your itching. Do you understand me, Mr. MacDonald? Good. I'm putting calamine on your scabs. This will control the inflammation, you understand?" Though in his years as a practitioner he had not been very attentive to day-to-day needs of patients, Dr. Holmes was well-known among his friends and colleagues for his calming manner in emergency or great sickness. When Hawthorne fell ill in 1864, he allowed no one but Dr. Holmes to examine him. Holmes was appalled at the condition in which he found the Salem novelist, and could do little but try to ease his suffering in his final days.

MacDonald's clothes had been shredded. The tracks on MacDonald's torso looked to be the claw marks of some attacking animal, but Holmes could see that MacDonald's own fingernails had dug under the skin. After being wrapped in compresses, MacDonald's squirming settled down.

"I want you to bite down hard on this, Mr. MacDonald, as hard as if you were a starving man coming onto a juicy beefsteak! It will taste wretched for a moment, but it will stop the pain in your tongue, do you understand?"

MacDonald lunged for the cloth and bit down hard. He winced ferociously upon impact, but soon fell into a numbed stillness. Holmes gradually removed the cloth. The doctor began to rise, but MacDonald grabbed Holmes by the velvet collar frantically, straining to see the figure through his swollen eyelids, and suddenly finding a voice of terror mingled with absolute confusion.

"-- killed me! You've killed me! Why have you killed me!" The voice was like lightning cleaving the air, and fled like thunder rolling away. Holmes wrestled MacDonald's hand off of his frock-coat and wiped the camphor from his hands on a fresh towel.

"The police carriage is coming up the street!" someone announced to the sight-seers, who were all quite rejuvenated by the prospect of new players to the scene.

Norton waved Holmes and Lowell into an empty corner of the carriage house.

Norton was nearly frantic. "MacDonald was whispering deliriously to me when I first put the cold towels on him, before the others arrived!"

"Could you understand him?" Lowell asked.

"He only could manage a few sentences, and was in quite a state of terror, but yes."

"Well?"

Norton tried to calm himself. "James, I think MacDonald just gave me our first description of Lucifer!"

The police carriage ejected two officers. They jumped out and lifted MacDonald's body in unison. Detective Rantoul emerged from the carriage and turned around in time to see three gentlemen in top hats slipping away from the scene.

"Will MacDonald survive, Wendell?" Norton asked as they slowed their walk. "Do you know how Lucifer managed this?"

"I believe I can surmise the method," Holmes said, walking in between Norton and Lowell down Commonwealth Avenue. "There is a strong libation that in small doses can relieve infection. No doubt our Lucifer witnessed this use while in one of the awful army hospitals. But when introduced in high quantities under the skin, either intentionally or by ill-trained doctors, it breeds relentless itching and scabbing, and with it delirium. MacDonald would have hardly been able to walk or open his eyes; he had been nearly incapacitated all at once, covered in scabs and abrasions. More likely than not Lucifer injected him in his sleep, and poor MacDonald wandered into his carriage house to try to alert someone. It was to his misfortune that none of his domestics could discover him as he was slipping in and out of consciousness, and they must have concluded he was not in the house. It's enough to make even the staunchest bachelor (like my poor brother) take a wife, so that someone on this earth might know his whereabouts! It will take MacDonald months before he can get by again with any normalcy. Yes, the profiteer will survive, and will suffer for it. I just pray the hospital doesn't get it in their heads to bleed his wounds."

"If MacDonald was of sound mind when he spoke to me of the attacker, Lowell, while you were fetching Holmes-," Norton stopped, noticing Holmes's expression turn introspective and troubled.

"If only I had been with you when you found him!" Holmes said to himself. "Can you imagine what that man has gone through? Every minute an abyss of suffering. Did you hear what he said to me?"

"Wendell," Lowell said, "the man was near delirium. It was not meant towards you."

"Yes, but shouldn't it be?"

"MacDonald would never have come to harm at all," Norton said reluctantly, "had he not taken up the plunder of our nation's treasury."

"Wendell," Lowell began, "you've done a good turn. And we thank you for it. Norton, I am going to stop at Elmwood. Wendell, can you make it home alright?"

"Norton and I should return at once to Craigie House and report what we've found to Longfellow," Holmes answered.

"Wendell?" Lowell studied Holmes's serious demeanor for a moment, then smiled broadly. "Well, give me a shake, then!" Lowell boomed, grabbing the doctor's small hand and clasping it vigorously.

"This will send me over the river to Somerville before it's all through, I know it," said Holmes.