“I must speak with you at once.” The college freshman was panting from exertion.

Longfellow and Lowell had spent the last week compiling lists of all their former Dante students. They could not use the official Harvard records, since that would risk attracting attention. This was a particularly taxing development for Lowell, who kept loose records and remembered only a handful of names at any given time. Even a student from a few years earlier might receive the warmest greeting upon meeting Lowell on the streets. “My dear boy!” and then, “Your name again?”

Fortunately, his two current students, Edward Sheldon and Pliny Mead, were immediately removed from any possibility of suspicion, as Lowell had been teaching them in his Dante seminar at Elmwood at the very time (by their best calculations) of Reverend Talbot’s murder.

“Professor Lowell. I received this notice in my box!” Sheldon shoved a slip of paper into Lowell’s hand. “A mistake?”

Lowell glanced at it indifferently. “No mistake. I have some things to tend to which necessitate freeing my time, only for a week or so, I hope. I have no doubt you are occupied enough to put Dante out of your mind for a spell.”

Sheldon shook his head in dismay. “But what of all you always say to us? What of a new circle of admirers finally widening to relieve Dante’s wandering? You have not yielded to the Corporation? You have not tired of the study of Dante, Professor?” the student pressed.

Lowell felt himself shiver at the question. “I know not the thinking man who can tire of Dante, my young Sheldon! Few men have meaning enough in themselves to penetrate a life and work of such depth. I prize him more as man, poet, and teacher every day. He gives hope, in our darkest hour, of a second chance. And until I meet Dante himself in the first purgatorial terrace above, upon my honor I shall never give an inch to the blasted tyrants of the Corporation!”

Sheldon swallowed hard. “So you will keep in mind my eagerness to continue through the Comedy?”

Lowell put his arm on Sheldon’s shoulder and walked with him. “You know, my lad, there is a story that Boccaccio tells of a woman passing by a door in Verona, where Dante was staying during his exile. She saw Dante across the street and pointed him out to another woman, saying, ‘That is Alighieri, the man who goes to Hell whenever he pleases and brings back news of the dead.’ And the other replied, ‘Very likely. Don’t you see what a curly beard he has, and what a dark face? Owing, I daresay, to the heat and smoke!’ “

The student laughed loudly.

“This exchange, it is said,” Lowell continued, “made Dante smile. Do you know why I doubt the story’s veracity, my dear boy?”

Sheldon contemplated the question with the same serious expression he wore during their Dante classes. “Perhaps, Professor, because this woman of Verona would in all actuality not know of the contents of Dante’s poem,” he postulated, “as only a select number of people of his day, his protectors prime among them, would have seen the manuscript before the end of his life, and even then only in small installments.”

“I do not for a second believe that Dante smiled,” Lowell answered with relish.

Sheldon started to respond, but Lowell lifted his hat and continued on his way toward Craigie House.

“Remember my eagerness, do!” Sheldon shouted after him.

Dr. Holmes, sitting in Longfellow’s library, had noticed a striking engraving printed in the newspaper by the arrangement of Nicholas Rey. The illustration showed the man who had died in the courtyard of the Central Station. The notice in the newspaper referenced nothing of that incident. But it showed the straggly, sunken face of the leaper as he appeared shortly before the show-up, and asked that any information on the man’s family be reported to the office of the chief of police.

“When do you hope to find a man’s family rather than the man himself?” Holmes asked the others. “When he’s dead,” he answered himself.

Lowell examined the likeness. “A sadder-looking man I don’t believe I’ve ever seen. And this matter is important enough to involve the chief of police. Wendell, I believe you’re right. The Healey boy said the police have not yet identified the man who whispered to Patrolman Rey before throwing himself out the window. It makes perfect sense they would submit a notice to the newspapers.”

The newspaper publisher owed Fields a favor. So Fields stopped by its office downtown. He was told that a mulatto police officer had placed the notice.

“Nicholas Rey.” Fields found this strange. “With all that’s going on between Healey and Talbot, it seems a bit queer that any policeman would expend any energy on a dead loafer.” They were eating their supper at Longfellow’s. “Could they know there is some connection with the murders? Could that patrolman have some idea what it was the man whispered?”

“It’s doubtful,” Lowell said. “Once he does, he could well be led to us.”

Holmes was unnerved by this. “Then we must find this man’s identity before Patrolman Rey!”

“Well, six cheers for Richard Healey then. We now know how it came to pass that Rey came to us with that hieroglyphic,” Fields said. “This leaper was brought in to show himself to the police with a horde of other beggars and thieves. The officers would have questioned them about Healey’s murder. We can conclude that this poor fellow recognized Dante, grew fearful, poured into Rey’s ear some verses in Italian from the very canto that inspired the murder, and ran off—a chase that ended in his fall from the window.”

“What could he have been so afraid of?” Holmes wondered.

“We can be confident he was not the murderer himself, since he was dead two weeks before the Reverend Talbot’s murder,” Fields said.

Lowell tugged on his mustache thoughtfully. “Yes, but he could have known the murderer and feared their association. Probably knew him very well, if that was the case.”

“He was frightened of his knowledge, just as we were. So how do we find out before the police who he was?” Holmes asked.

Longfellow had been mostly silent through this exchange. Now he remarked, “We possess two natural advantages over the police in finding the man’s identity, my friends. We know the man recognized Dante’s inspiration in the terrible details of the murder and that, in his time of crisis, Dante’s verses came straightaway to his tongue. And so we can surmise that he was very likely an Italian beggar, well read in literature. And a Catholic.”

A man with a harsh three-days’ growth over his face and a hat pulled down over his eyes and ears was lying at the foot of Holy Cross, one of Boston’s oldest Catholic churches, posed as inertly as a sacred statue. He was stretched in the most leisurely posture human bones allow on a sidewalk and eating his dinner from an earthen pot. A pedestrian passing asked a question. He did not turn his head or respond.

“Sir.” Nicholas Rey knelt beside him, holding closer the newspaper likeness of the leaper. “Do you recognize this man, sir?”

Now the loafer rolled his eyes just enough to look.

Rey removed his badge from inside his coat. “Sir, my name is Nicholas Rey, I am a city police officer. It is important that I know this man’s name. He has passed on. He is in no trouble. Please, do you know him or someone who might?”

The man stuck his fingers into his pot and plucked a morsel between his thumb and forefinger, then released it to his mouth. Afterward, he rolled his head in a short, untroubled negation.

Patrolman Rey started down the street, where a row of noisy grocery and butcher carts lined the route.

Only ten minutes later, a horsecar expelled passengers at a nearby platform and two other men approached the immovable loafer. One of them held up the same newspaper folded to the same illustration.