Was I haunted? Or was it, after all, but a hallucination—due to grief, trouble, and the drug of the opiate?
I sat and brooded until I thought I could hear the voices of Burker and
Dolores in converse.
This I knew to be hallucination, pure and simple, and I went to see my friend (if he will let me call him what he is in the truest and highest sense) Major Jackson of the R.A.M.C.
He took me for a long ride, kept me to dinner, and manufactured a job for me—a piece of work that would occupy and tire me.
He assured me that the Burker affair was pure hallucination and staked his professional reputation that the image of Burker came upon my retina from within and not from without. "The shock of the deaths of your wife and your friend on consecutive days has unhinged you, and very naturally so," he said.
Of course I did not tell him that I had killed Burker, though I should have liked to do so. I felt I had no right to put him in the position of having to choose between denouncing me and condoning a murder—compounding a felony.
Nor did I see any reason for confessing to the Police what I had done (even though Dolores was dead) and finishing my career on the scaffold.
One owes something to one's ancestors as well as to oneself. Well, perhaps it was a hallucination. I would wait.
At the next drill Burker was present and rode as Number Three in Section
Six.
As there were twenty-three (living) on parade I ordered Number Twenty-three to ride as Number Four of his section and leave a blank file.