g doings, as _he_ insists that I
shall and I dare not disobey him. I therefore write this confession, to
be read by you after I am dead.

"'You tell me I _imagine_ I hear the voice and see the man. I tell you,
doctor, you who think me crazy are the one who is deceived. You do not
believe in telepathy and thought-transference, and yet I could tell many
times when you looked at me of what you were thinking. I tell you that I
hear Jim's voice as plainly as I ever heard yours, and he talks to me
and tells me that he will never leave me while I live, and then he
laughs. Oh, that laugh! He comes often at night and wakes me out of a
sound sleep with that awful laugh, and then he whispers to me to go to
sleep again. Of course you do not believe in spirits or ghosts, and you
believe I am crazy, and that the half-invisible form of my dead partner
which comes to me and talks to me, and whose voice I hear as plainly as
I ever heard yours, exists wholly in my imagination. Well, doctor, you
have been kind to me, and I hope and pray you will never suffer the way
I have suffered during the past three years.

"'Just three years ago to-day I was on board the "Ada Gray," a small
schooner off the coast of Florida, bound for the Isthmus. There were
seven of us in all, including the captain and mate, the latter an old
pal of mine who had arranged to get me in as one of the crew. In some
way he had learned that the captain was to take with him some two
thousand in gold, and although we had no plans, we intended to get the
gold in some way. On our way down we had talked over many schemes, but
none of them seemed satisfactory. The gold was kept in a small fireproof
safe in the captain's cabin, but it was an old-fashioned key-lock
affair, and we did not anticipate much trouble from that quarter, even
if we could not find the key. The great point was, how we were to get
the money and get away. At last we decided to drug the men's coffee,
and when they were sleeping from its effects, we would take the money
and leave in the schooner's yawl, in which, as the weather was very calm
and the Florida coast could be seen in the distance, we should have no
difficulty in making the shore.

"'Jim had overhauled the medicine chest and had found a vial containing
a lot of morphine pills marked one-eighth grain, and as neither he nor I
knew how much morphine it took to drug a man, he watched his opportunity
and emptied the contents of the vial into the coffe