ways seemed somewhat uncanny, and had I proved
more sympathetic he doubtless would have gone farther and told me of
certain problems which he professed to have solved concerning the life
beyond this. One thing that he had said came back vividly: "If I could
only overcome that purely gross and animal love of life that makes us
all shun death, I would kill myself, for I know how far more powerful I
could be in spirit than in flesh."

The manner of the suicide was startling, and that was what might have
been expected from this odd character. Evidently scorning the flummery
of funerals, he had gone into a little canyon near the military
reservation and blown himself into a million fragments with dynamite,
so that all of him that was ever found was some minute particles of
flesh and bone.

I kept the letter a secret, for I desired to observe the officer
without rousing his suspicion of my purpose; it would be an admirable
test of a dead man's power and deliberate intention to haunt the
living, for so I interpreted the letter. The officer thus to be
punished was an oldish man, short, apoplectic, overbearing, and
irascible. Generally he was kind to most of the men in a way; but he
was gross and mean, and that explained sufficiently his harsh treatment
of young Gratmar, whom he could not understand, and his efforts to
break that flighty young man's spirit.

Not very long after the suicide certain modifications in the officer's
conduct became apparent to my watchful oversight. His choler, though
none the less sporadic, developed a quality which had some of the
characteristics of senility; and yet he was still in his prime, and
passed for a sound man. He was a bachelor, and had lived always alone;
but presently he began to shirk solitude at night and court it in
daylight. His brother-officers chaffed him, and thereupon he would
laugh in rather a forced and silly fashion, quite different from the
ordinary way with him, and would sometimes, on these occasions, blush
so violently that his face would become almost purple. His soldierly
alertness and sternness relaxed surprisingly at some times and at
others were exaggerated into unnecessary acerbity, his conduct in this
regard suggesting that of a drunken man who knows that he is drunk and
who now and then makes a brave effort to appear sober. All these
things, and more, indicating some mental strain, or some dreadful
apprehension, or perhaps something worse than either, were obse