“They locked Rey up in the Tombs, Chief!” Stoneweather protested, blood streaming from his thick nose.

Rey said, “Chief, I need to get to Cambridge without delay!”

“Patrolman Rey…” Chief Kurtz said. “You’re supposed to be involved in my…”

“Now, Chief! I must go!”

“Let him free!” Kurtz bellowed to the detectives, who withdrew from Rey. “Every damned one of you scoundrels in my office! This moment!”

Oliver Wendell Holmes constantly checked behind him for Teal. The way was clear. He had not been followed from the underground tunnels. “Longfellow… Longfellow,” he repeated to himself as he passed through Cambridge.

Then in front of him he saw Teal leading Longfellow along the sidewalk. The poet was walking cautiously on the thinning snow.

Holmes was so afraid at that moment that there was only one thing he could do to stop himself from falling faint. He had to act with no hesitation. So he yelled at the top of his lungs: “Teal!” It was a shriek that could bring out the whole neighborhood.

Teal turned, completely alert.

Holmes took the musket from his coat and pointed it with trembling hands.

Teal did not seem to take note of the gun at all. His mouth stirred and he released a soaked orphan of the alphabet as he spat into the white blanket at his feet: E “Mr. Longfellow, Dr. Holmes shall be your first,” he said. “He shall be your first to punish for what you’ve done. He’ll be our example to the world.”

Teal lifted Longfellow’s hand, in which he held the army revolver, and directed it at Holmes.

Holmes moved closer, his musket pointed at Teal. “Don’t you move any further, Teal! I’ll do this! I’ll shoot you! Let Longfellow free and you can take me.”

“This is punishment, Dr. Holmes. All of you who have abandoned God’s justice must now meet your final sentence. Mr. Longfellow, on my command. Ready… aim…”

Holmes stepped forward solidly and raised his gun to the level of Teal’s neck. There wasn’t an ounce of fear in the man’s face. He was a permanent soldier; there was no one left beneath. There were no choices left in him—only the incorrigible zeal to do right that had passed like a current through all humanity at one time or another, usually fizzling rapidly. Holmes shivered. He did not know whether he had sufficient reserves of that same zeal to stop Dan Teal from the destiny he had caught himself in.

“Fire, Mr. Longfellow,” Teal said. “You’ll fire now!” He put his hand on Longfellow’s and wrapped his fingers around the poet’s.

Swallowing hard, Holmes moved his musket away from Teal and pointed it directly at Longfellow.

Longfellow shook his head. Teal took a confused backward step, pulling his captive with him.

Holmes nodded firmly. “I’ll shoot him down, Teal,” he said.

“No.” Teal moved his head in rapid motions.

“Yes I will, Teal! Then he’ll not have had his punishment! He’ll be dead—he’ll be ashes!” Holmes yelled, aiming the musket higher, at Longfellow’s head.

“No, you can’t! He must take the others with him! This is not done!”

Holmes steadied the gun at Longfellow, whose eyes were tightly shut in horror. Teal shook his head rapidly and for a moment seemed about to scream. Then he turned as though someone were waiting behind him and then turned to his left and then his right, and finally ran, ran with fury away from the scene. Before he was too far down the street, a shot rang out, and then another ringing burst hung in the air, mixed with a dying cry.

Longfellow and Holmes could not help looking at the guns in their own hands. They followed the last sound. There on a bed of snow was Teal. Hot blood, cutting a rivulet through untouched white and unwilling snow, floated down from him. Two red spots gurgled in the man’s army blouse. Holmes knelt down and his brilliant hands went to work, feeling for life.

Longfellow inched closer. “Holmes?”

Holmes’s hands stopped.

Over Teal’s body stood a crazy-eyed Augustus Manning, his body trembling, his teeth chattering and fingers shaking. Manning dropped his rifle into the snow at his feet. He motioned with his stiff beard back at his house and pointed.

He tried to string his thoughts together. It was several minutes before anything coherent emerged. “The patrolman guarding my house left a few hours ago! Then just now I heard shouting and saw him through my window,” he said. “I saw him, his uniform… it all came to me, everything. He stripped my clothes, Mr. Longfellow, and, and… he tied me… took me without clothes…”

Longfellow offered a consoling hand, and Manning sobbed into the poet’s shoulder as his wife came running outside.

A police carriage halted behind the small circle they formed around the body. Nicholas Rey had his revolver out as he rushed over. Another carriage followed, carrying Sergeant Stoneweather and two more policemen.

Longfellow took Rey’s arm, his eyes bright and questioning.

“She’s fine,” Rey said before the poet could ask. “I have a patrolman watching her and her governess.”

Longfellow nodded his gratitude. Holmes had grabbed a fence railing in front of Manning’s house to catch his breath.

“Holmes, how wondrous! Perhaps you need to lie down inside,” Longfellow said with giddiness and fear. “Why, you’ve done it! But how…”

“My dear Longfellow, I believe daylight will clear up all that lamplight has left doubtful,” Holmes said. He led the policemen through town to the church and the underground tunnels to rescue Lowell and Fields.

XXI

“Hold, hold, wait a minute,” spat out the Spanish Jew to his crafty mentor. “Then ain’t that mean, Langdon, that you’ll be the very last of the Boston Five?”

“Burndy wasn’t one of the original five, my fair sheeny,” answered Langdon Peaslee omnisciently. “The Five were, bless each one of their souls as they drop into Hell below—and mine own, too, when I join them—Randall, who’s serving half-a-stretch in the Tombs; Dodge, who suffered from a nervous collapse and has retired out West; Turner, who was jammed by his ladybird of two and a quarter years—if that ain’t a lesson to not hitch yourself I haven’t heard one; and dear Simonds, holed up on the wharf side, too cup-shot to crack open a child’s jug.”

“Oh it’s a shame. A shame,” moaned one of the men in Peaslee’s audience of four.

“Say again?” Peaslee raised a limber eyebrow in reproach.

“A shame to see him about to walk the ladder!” the cross-eyed thief continued. “Never met the man, no. But I’ve heard it said he was just about the best safecracker Boston’s ever had! He could knock over a safe with a feather, says they!”

The other three listeners turned silent and, had they been standing rather than sitting at a table, might have shuffled their boots nervously on the rough shells littering the bar floor or wandered away at such a comment made to Langdon W. Peaslee. Under the circumstances, they took quiet swills of their drinks or absent drags on the unwrapped cigars that had been passed out by Peaslee.

The door to the tavern swung open and a fly propelled itself into the smoky black compartments that divided the barroom and buzzed around Peaslee’s table. A small number of the fly’s brothers and sisters had survived the winter and a smaller number still had thrived in certain sections of the woods and forests of Massachusetts and would continue to do so, though Professor Louis Agassiz of Harvard, had he known, would have declared it preposterous. With a darting glance, Peaslee noticed the strange flaming red eyes and large bluish body. He swatted it away, and at the other end of the bar, some men made sport of chasing it.

Langdon Peaslee reached for his strong punch, the special drink of the house at the Stackpole Tavern. Peaslee did not have to adjust his position in his hardwood chair to reach the drink with his left hand, even though the chair was pushed out a fair distance from the table so that he could adequately address his crooked semicircle of apostles. Peaslee’s arachnid arms allowed him to reach many things in life without the need to budge.