Twenty living men and one dead faced me, twenty dismounted and one mounted.  I called the corporal in charge of the armoury.

“How many on parade?” I asked.

He looked puzzled, counted, and said:—­

“Why—­twenty, ain’t there?”

I numbered the troop.

Twenty—­and Burker.

“Tell off by sections.”

Five sections—­and Burker.

“Sections right.”

A column of five sections—­and Burker, in the rear.

I called out the section-leader of Number One section.

“Are the sections correctly proved?” I asked, and added:  “Put the troop back in line and tell-off again”.

“Five sections, correct,” he reported.

I held that drill, with five sections of living men, and a single file of dead, who manoeuvred to my word.

When I gave the order “With Numbers Three for action dismount,” or “Right-hand men, for action dismount,” Burker remained mounted.  When I dismounted the whole troop, Burker remained mounted.  Otherwise he drilled precisely as Number Twenty-one would have drilled in a troop of twenty-one men.

Was I frightened?  I do not know.

At first my heart certainly pounded as though it would leap from my body, and I felt dazed, lost, and shocked.

I think I was frightened—­not of Burker so much as of the unfamiliar, the unknown, the impossible.

How would you feel if your piano suddenly began to play of itself?  You would be alarmed and afraid probably, not frightened of the piano, but of the fact.

A door could not frighten you—­but you would surely be alarmed at its persistently opening, each time you shut, locked, and bolted it, if it acted thus.

Of Burker I had no fear—­but I was perturbed by the fact that the dead could ride with the living.

When I gave the order “Dismiss” at the end of the parade Burker rode away, as he had always done, in the direction of his bungalow.

Returning to my lonely house, I sat me down and pondered this appalling event that had come like a torrent, sweeping away familiar landmarks of experience, idea, and belief.  I was conscious of a dull anger against Burker and then against God.

Why should He allow Burker to haunt me?...

Why should Evil triumph?...

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.