the correctness o' your
diagnosis."

"And it would that!" the Irishman chimed in. "So trot out your bacillus,
by all manner of means!"

The Resident Surgeon babbled something incoherent, and melted out of the
room.

"Moppin' his head as he goes down the passage," said McFadyen, coming back
from the door.

"He'll no be in sic a sweatin' hurry to come back," pronounced the canny
Scot, shedding a wink from a dry, red-fringed eyelid. He produced from the
roomy breast-pocket of his khaki Service jacket a rubber-tubed
stethoscope, and put it silently into the hand Saxham had mechanically
stretched out for it. Then he drew back, his eyes, like those of the other
two spectators of the strange scene that was beginning, fixed upon the
chief actor in it. One other, weak after his swoon as a new-born child,
lay passively, helplessly upon the bed.

Saxham, his square face stony and set, moved with a noiseless, feline,
padding step towards the prone victim. A gleam of apprehension shot into
Julius Fraithorn's great dark eyes, reopening now to consciousness. They
fixed themselves, with an instinct born of that sudden thrill of fear,
upon the lightly-closed right hand. Instantly comprehending, Saxham lifted
the hand, showed that it held no instrument save the stethoscope, and
dropped it again by his side, drawing nearer. Then the massive,
close-cropped black head sank to the level of Julius Fraithorn's breast,
revealed in its ghastly, emaciated nakedness by the open nightshirt. The
massive shoulders bowed, the supple body curved, the keen ear joined
itself to the heaving surface. In a moment more the agonising, hacking,
rending cough came on. Julius battled for air. Raising him deftly and
tenderly, Saxham signed to the nurse, who hurried to him, answering his
low questions in whispers, giving aid where he indicated it required.

Steadily, patiently, the binaural stethoscope travelled over the lung
area, gathering abnormal sounds, searching for silent spaces, sucking
evidence into the assimilative brain behind the eyes that saw nothing but
the man upon the bed, the locked human casket housing the secret that was
slowly, surely coming to light. In the fierce determination to gain it, he
threw the stethoscope away, and glued his avid ear to the man again.

"Toch! but I wouldna' have missed this for a kittie o' Kruger sovereigns!"
the Chief Medical Officer whispered to his colleague from Meath. And
McFadyen whispered back:

"Nor