Well, once again, I do not know,—­and yet I have seen, not once but repeatedly, not by moonlight in a churchyard, but under the Indian sun on a parade-ground, the ghost of a man and of all his accoutrements,—­of a rifle, of a horse and all a horse’s trappings.

I have been a teetotaller for years, I have never had sunstroke and I am as absolutely sane as ever a man was.

And further I am in no sense remorseful, repentant, or “dogged by the spectre of an evil deed”.

I killed Burker intentionally.  Were he alive again I would kill him again.  I punished him myself because the law could not punish him as he deserved, and I in no way regret or deplore my just and judicial action.  There are deeds a gentleman must resent and punish—­with the extreme penalty.  No, it is in no sense a case of the self-tormented wretch driven mad by the awful hallucinations of his guilty, unhinged mind.  I am no haunted murderer pursued by phantoms and illusions, believing himself always in the presence of his victim’s ghost.

All people who have read anything, have read of the irresistible fascination that the scene of the murder has for the murderer, of the way in which the victim “haunts” the slayer, and of how the truth that “murder will out” is really based on the fact that the murderer is his own most dangerous accuser by reason of his life of terror, remorse, and terrible hallucination.

My case is in no wise parallel.

I am absolutely without fear, regret, remorse, repentance, dread or terror in the matter of my killing Sergeant Burker.  Exactly how and why I killed him, and how and why I am about to kill myself, I will now set forth, without the slightest exaggeration, special pleading or any other deviation from the truth....

I am to my certain knowledge the eighth consecutive member of my family, in the direct line, to follow the profession of arms, but am the first to do so without bearing a commission.  My father died young in the rank of Captain, my grandfather led his own regiment in the Crimea, my great-grandfather was a Lieutenant-General, and, if I told you my real name, you could probably state something that he did at Waterloo.

I went to Sandhurst and I was expelled from Sandhurst—­very rightly and justly—­for an offence, or rather the culminating offence of a series of offences, that were everything but mean, dishonest or underhand.  I was wild, hasty, undisciplined and I was lost for want of a father to thrash me as a boy, and by possession of a most loving and devoted mother who worshipped, spoiled—­and ruined me.

I enlisted under an assumed name in my late father’s (and grandfather’s) old Regiment of Foot and quickly rose to the rank of Sergeant-Major.

I might have had a commission in South Africa but I decided that I preferred ruling in hell to serving in heaven, and declined to be a grey-haired Lieutenant and a nuisance to the Officers’ Mess of the Corps I would not leave until compelled.