Stahlmann in his agony seemed to hear once more the piteous cry which the dog had uttered with its expiring breath, and to him the wail sounded in its pathetic mournfulness like the mysterious herald of another death.
The diary is so blurred at this point that it is hardly legible. What can be read is incomprehensible from broken, incoherent sentences—the empty language of a lunatic. Save one remaining passage, I could make out nothing further. This entry must have been written in a lucid interval when he realized to what a fearful condition he had been reduced by unbroken solitude. Because it is the last record, I translate it literally, as follows:
“That cry again—what have I come through? Hell with its host of furies can not be worse than this awful Crib—I kill myself.
G. Stahlmann.”
What remains is soon told. A few inquiries in the proper direction revealed that on the morning of the first of May, 1868, when the tug boat from Chicago made its usual trip to the Crib to supply provisions, the dog was discovered dead upon the floor, and near by—just to the right of the entrance, and about ten feet distant from it—hung the dead body of Gustav Stahlmann, suspended by the neck from one of the rafters. It was at once cut down and the Coroner quietly notified. Among his few effects was found the memorandum book which so curiously came into my possession.
The authorities were in no way to blame for this unfortunate occurrence. On that day they placed several persons in charge of this lonely structure and have changed them at regular intervals ever since. Because if the circumstance were known, they were fearful they could get no one to fill the situation, either on account of the solitude or from the fact that many persons are afraid to live in a house that has been the scene of a suicide—they wisely concluded to say nothing whatever about the melancholy event, and, as I said before, few persons in the city are acquainted with its details.
PROF. KELLERMANN’S FUNERAL.
It had snowed persistently all day, and now, at night, the wind had risen and blew in furious gusts against the windows, a bleak December gale.