Who," Captain Hahn seemed to have a difficulty in compressing his
feelings into words, "who ordered you to untie that prisoner?"

"No one," replied Jovannic. His gaze at the convulsed face opposite
him narrowed. He put a hand on the table as though to spring up from
his seat. "Is he dead, then?" he demanded.

"Damn it; so you knew he'd do it!" roared the captain. "Don't deny
it; you've admitted it. You knew he'd hang himself, and yet."

"But he couldn't," cried Jovannic, as Captain Hahn choked
and sputtered. "I ordered him to be watched. I told the
sergeant"--Captain Hahn broke in with something like a howl. "I
wasn't going to have soldiers kept out of their beds for stuff like
that rotten, sentimental Austrian nonsense! I sent 'em off to get
their sleep; but you, you knew, you."

"Ah!" said Jovannic. "Then the Herr Hauptmann cancelled my
arrangements for the prisoner's safety and substituted his own! I am
glad I am not responsible. So he hanged himself?"

Captain Hahn opened his mouth and bit at the air. His hand was on his
heavy cane. The creeping mess waiter, tray in hand, came quivering to
his elbow; never in his service time or his life was he more welcome
to a German officer. The captain grabbed the glass and drank. Then
with a sweep of his right arm he slashed the man with his cane.

"You slow-footed hound!" he bellowed.

Jovannic looked at him curiously. He had not doubted that what the
girl had told him was true; but many things can be true in the
stillness and tangled shadows of the evening that are false in the
light of the morning. This, then, was a murderer, whom a whole
population, a whole country, believed no, knew to be damned to all
eternity this incontinent, stagnant-souled, kept creature of the
army! Not even eternal damnation could dignify him or make him seem
aught but the absurd and noxious thing that he was; a soul like his
would make itself at home in hell like the old sergeant in the
conquered province.

Later in the forenoon he saw the body; and that, too, he felt, failed
to rise to the quality of its fate. Beyond the orchard of old
derelict fruit trees behind the stable two men dug a grave in the
sun, while from the shade the old sergeant smoked and watched them;
and a little apart lay a stretcher, a tattered and stained blanket
outlining the shape upon it. Jovannic was aware of the old man's
shrewd eye measuring him and his temper as he stopped by the
stretcher.

China-bowled pipe