A man retells a story he was once told by Steve Dempsey, a skilled machinist working in the American Navy during World War I. Dempsey told this same story to the men on his team in France. On a Sunday in Paris, he’d been walking alone when he saw a lonely, sad woman, dressed in black, crying with a coffin beside her. Steve understood that the man’s son had died, and he was sitting in the coffin, and she was trying to give him a funeral but was too poor to do so. He helped her carry the coffin, as well as to get a whole group of American soldiers to help with the man’s funereal rituals. In the end, they got together an impressive makeshift event in honor of the fallen son, whom the American soldiers presumed to have been a fellow army man. A few days after, Steve is shown an excerpt from the newspaper observing how odd it had been that a great group of American soldiers was assembled at the funeral of an apache murderer. Shocked at what he’d unwittingly done for a murderer, Steve noted that, even if the corpse he’d honored wasn’t a first-class corpse, at the very least, it’d been a first-class funeral.