"I don’t know how long it was from the time I lighted the candle in the kitchen downstairs until I stood with it in the doorway of the bedroom of the dead bride. Not very long, probably, because the melting candle grease was just beginning to run hot onto my fingers when I turned to glance toward the bed, wondering why the captain had kept so damned quiet. It wasn't like him.
"And there he was, lying across the bed on his back, the tips of his shoes just touching the floor. Asleep? No. I don't know how I knew he wasn't asleep . . . . the court martial inquiry kept asking me that . . . .
"But I saw he had something wound round his neck, something that glinted in the candle light like the braid of a woman's copper-red hair. And his hands were above his head. One of them clutched a tortoise-shell comb. I knew he wasn't asleep. I knew he was dead! . . . .
"How I knew, I couldn't tell you nor any damned court martial inquiry on earth. God knows they drove me crazy enough asking me that and what else I saw. . . .
"Didn't I see nothing else? No, but I thought I heard or felt something move near that black hole where that other door opened yawning into a closet. My candle went out—maybe it was only the night wind from the window—and I dropped it. I dropped the bundle of things belonging to Captain Bott. I crossed the threshold. I went down the stairs in the dark, running.
"I fell at the bottom. I remember that . . . And I told the court martial inquiry so; 'twas about the only thing those smug guys believed that I told them. . . . But I was on my feet and out of that house before I knew I had fallen . . ."
"Ha! I can see it! You, too, think I'm soft-boiled. . . . So did the court martial inquiry. That's why they sent me here, among these crazy people. But say, Buddy, don't believe what the hospital interne tells you. He's crazy, like the rest of 'em. He's as hard-boiled, too, as Captain Bott was. And that guy was so hard-boiled he didn’t believe in French ghost stories."
"That nut you just talked with tells his story to anyone who will listen," the interne remarked casually, as we returned to the office of the commandant of the Army and Navy Insane Asylum. "Probably you think you've heard a crackin' good ghost story, but what you really heard was the confession of a crazy murderer who ought to have been the third on the gallows at Is-Sur-Tille."
"Isn't there a haunted chateau at Is-Sur-Tille, and didn't the officer he tells about die in the bedroom there?"
"Oui, mais certainement! as the frogs have it. If that chateau isn't haunted, it ought to be. There's a story in the village of the bride's death there. And Captain Bott died there all right enough. But that thing they found twined around his neck 'like the braid of a woman's copper-red hair' was, in fact, real copper—copper wire stolen from a lineman's kit. It might look like hair to a crazy man."
"But that comb?" I persisted. "What about that tortoise-shell comb?"
"That? Oh, the nut stole that, too. It belonged to one of the girls of the town whom the private knew before the captain beat his time with her."
