tion broke out on his brow, while his hands felt temperate and moist.
That was hopeful, and I felt more confident as I sat there watching him hour after hour, wondering whether success would attend my remedy, and whether this was the laying of the first stone of a new temple of health. Then as the time went on I grew despondent, and ready to rouse him from the lethargy into which he had fallen, and which might after all be only the prelude to a deeper sleep.
I heard steps come and go, and knew that my poor little wife must be full of anxiety about me.
"But what is her anxiety to mine?" I muttered; and I still kept watch, noting every change. Now I was buoyed up by hope, and saw triumph—the pinnacle of the mount toward which I tried to climb; now I was sinking in despair, feeling that through my carelessness I was slowly watching a man glide toward the dark gate through which he could never return.
It must have been about seven o'clock, and it was fast growing dusk in my room. I was thinking about the man's wanderings and confused talk about being haunted, and trying to piece together his verbal fragments into a whole, when he suddenly opened his eyes again, and began to talk hurriedly, taking up his theme just where he had left off, and as if in utter ignorance of the fact that he had been silent for hours, during which I had passed through a period of agony such as turns men's hair white.
"Yes, doctor," he said, "no secrets from your medical man. You will not betray me; and it was a fair fight. He brought it on, I swear to that. He made me mad so that I hit out—hardly knowing what I did, and it was not until he had half killed me that I threw him, and he went over the edge, down, down with a horrible crash into the gully. I could see him lying there dead. But it was not murder, eh? It was not murder, doctor?"
"Are these wanderings of a diseased imagination?" I asked myself; and he looked up as sharply as if I had spoken aloud.
"It's all true, doctor," he said. "I threw him down, and he fell, and then I turned and fled, for I knew they would hang me, if I was taken. Doctor," he cried, fiercely, "I wish they had, for I have suffered ten thousand times more agony in these wretched years. Yes: he has always been with me, always. Haunting me day and night, leering at me, and showing me the whole scene again, till I have drunk, and drunk, and drunk to drown it all—gone on drinking till I am the miserable wretch you see. But you'll cure me now, for it was all fancy. People who are dead don't haunt folks, eh?"
"No, sir," I said, as I watched the strange play on the man's countenance, and began trying to connect his words with a half-forgotten story of outrage in Western Australia years before.
"No," he said, excitedly, "and you'll cure me now. It has all been fancy."
"That you killed—murdered a man in Western Australia?"
"Killed, not murdered," he cried, excitedly; "no, that was no fancy. I mean this constant horror of seeing him night and day."
I forgot my anxiety respecting the action of the drug for some minutes, as I said—my recollection of some such event coming vividly back—
"You don't mean the outrage in the Blue Gum Gully?"
His jaw dropped, and he stared at me wonderingly.
"What—what do you know about the Blue Gum Gully?" he stammered at last.
"I remember hearing about the case."
"Did—did they find him?" he whispered with a ghastly look in his face.
"No: I believe he crawled to a shepherd's hut, and the man fetched a doctor from thirty miles away."
"Too late—too late."
"No: I remember now," I said. "Another surgeon was fetched as well, and they put a silver patch in the man's fractured skull."
"What?" cried my patient. "No; you are telling me that for reasons of your own."
"I am telling you because it is the truth. I saw the man, and the injured head."
"No, no, not the same," he cried. "Who was he? What was his name?"
"Johnson—Brown—Thomson—Smith," I muttered, and he started a little at the last word.
"Yes. I remember now," I cried. "Robert Danesmith."
My patient literally leaped at me, and caught me by the breast, with his eyes starting, his lips quivering, and the veins about his temples standing out.
"Tell me again," he panted. "Swear that it is true."
"There is no need," I said. "How could I have known?"
"No," he said, calming down; "there is
