"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 khâki 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 me, for your shoes. 'Ssh!"
Saxham was lifting up the great stooping shoulders, and beginning to speak in a voice totally different from that of the man known in Gueldersdorp as the Dop Doctor. Clear, ringing, concise, the sentences left his lips:
"Gentlemen, I invite your attention to a case of involuntary simulation of the symptoms distinguishing pulmonary tuberculosis by a patient suffering from a grave disease of totally different and possibly much less malignant character. Oblige me by stepping nearer!"