“Cease your blubbering at once!” Colonel Reginald T. Badweather III (who was not a colonel at all) set his monocle in his right eye and placed his hands on his ample sides. He glared down at the young woman mourning in his office. Of course, it was only an office insomuch as there was a door between the two folding chairs and the outside world.

“Really, now, stop your boohooing! I’ll not have you dampening this establishment. I really won’t!” The girl burst into tears anew. The colonel rolled his eyes, removed a handkerchief from his coat pocket with an exaggerated gesture, and handed it to the woman.

“How can you be so insensitive? My husband is dead!”

“Your husband is nothing of the sort,” he replied, incorrectly. If anyone in the world was the sort to be dead, it was her husband.

“But, the body?” she wailed melodically. A most impressive feat, to say the least.

“Fakery!” he declared, shaking his fist at the heavens, though the heavens had done nothing to deserve such treatment. “And I shall prove it!”