One day something strange happened: head forester Stepaniuk found a hanged man in the border forest. He was cold, blue and rigid when he was cut down. The district medical officer, Dr Kiniower, said that he had already been dead for several days, that he had hanged himself about a week earlier. Nobody knew who he was and the gendarme Piotrak notified the examining magistrate. The latter came from Zlotogrod. He had the corpse taken to the mortuary there. The inhabitants of the entire district were summoned, a dozen at a time, on specific days, to identify the dead man. There would have been no need to summon them. They poured in from all over, out of curiosity alone. Even Sameschkin, although he was not summoned because he did not belong to the district, went along out of curiosity. But he alone recognized the dead man: it was the horse-minder Michael Klajka. He had been locked up two years before. He had been one of the convicts chosen to deal with the removal of the corpses of the cholera patients. And the fact that he had died in hospital, of the cholera, and been buried on a certain day, had been recorded in the books and given the official stamp.

Well? Had he risen from the dead in order to hang himself in the border forest? An investigation was instituted. Some convicts, who were brought from the prison, also recognized their fellow prisoner, Michael Klajka. It only took a week before two of the district clerks were arrested and confessed that they had been bribed and had made out false death certificates. They also confessed that it was Kapturak who had bribed them.

Another week went by. The outcome of the investigation was conveyed to gendarmerie sergeant Piotrak and to Inspector Eibenschütz, and they were given the task of continuing to meet Kapturak in the border tavern as before. So they continued to meet him and they played tarock. He felt quite safe. He knew nothing of the arrest of the two district clerks, and the money the relatives of the ‘dead’ convicts had paid him had long been safely on the other side of the border, with the money-changer Piczemk.