AN
OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE
By
Ambrose Bierce
A man stood
upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord.
A rope loosely encircled his neck.
It was attached to a stout
cross-timber above his head, and the slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose
boards laid upon the sleepers1 supporting the metals of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners — two
private soldiers of the Federal army,
directed by .a sergeant, who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff. At a
short remove upon the same temporary platform was an officer in the
uniform of his rank, armed. He was a
captain. A sentinel at each, end of the bridge stood with his rifle in the position
known as "support," that is to say, vertical in front of the left
shoulder, the hammer resting on the forearm thrown straight across the chest — a formal and
unnatural position, enforcing an erect carriage
of the body. It did not appear to be the
duty of these two men to know what was occurring at the center of the bridge;
they merely blockaded the two ends
of the foot plank which traversed it.
Beyond one of the sentinels, nobody was in sight; the
railroad ran straight away into a forest for, a hundred yards, then, curving,
was lost to view. Doubtless there was an outpost farther along. The other bank of the stream was open ground — a gentle acclivity crowned with a stockade of
vertical tree trunks, loop-holed for
rifles, with a single embrasure through which protruded, the muzzle of a brass cannon commanding the bridge. Midway of the slope between bridge and fort
were the spectators — a single company of infantry in line, at "parade rest," the
butts of the rifles on the ground, the barrels inclining slightly backward
against the right shoulder, the hands crossed upon the stock. A lieutenant stood at
the right of the line, the point of his sword upon the ground, his left hand
resting upon his right. Excepting the
group of four at the center of the bridge,
not a man moved. The company faced the
bridge, staring stonily, motionless. The sentinels, facing the banks of the
stream, might have been statues to adorn the
bridge. The captain stood with folded
arms, silent, observing the work of his
subordinates, but making no sign. Death
is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal
manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar
with him. In the code of military
etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference.
The
man who was engaged in being hanged was apparently about thirty-five years of age. He was a civilian, if one might judge from
his dress, which was that of a planter. His
features were good — a straight nose, firm mouth, broad forehead, from which his long, dark hair was
combed straight back, falling behind
his ears to the collar of his well-fitting frock coat. He wore a mustache and pointed beard, but no whiskers; his eyes were
large and dark gray, and had a
kindly expression which one would hardly have expected in one whose neck was in
the hemp. Evidently this was no vulgar
assassin. The liberal military code makes provision for hanging many kinds
of people, and gentlemen are not excluded.
The preparations being complete, the two private soldiers
stepped aside and each drew away the plank upon
which he had been standing. The sergeant
turned to the captain, saluted, and placed himself
immediately behind that officer, who in
turn moved apart one pace. These
movements left the condemned man and
the sergeant standing on the two ends of the same plank, which spanned three of
the crossties of the bridge. The end
upon which the civilian stood almost, but not quite reached a fourth. This plank had been held in place by the
weight of the captain; it was now held by that of the sergeant. At a signal from the
former, the latter would step aside, the plank would tilt, and the condemned
man go down between two ties. The
arrangement commended itself to his
judgment as simple and effective. His
face had not been covered nor his eyes bandaged. He looked a moment at his "unsteadfast footing," then let his gaze wander
to the swirling water of the stream racing
madly beneath his feet. A piece of
dancing driftwood caught his attention
and his eyes followed it down the current.
How slowly it appeared to move! What
a sluggish stream.
He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon
his wife and children. The water; touched to gold by the early sun, the
brooding mists under the banks at some
distance down the stream, the fort, the soldiers, the piece of drift — all had distracted him.
And now he became conscious of a new disturbance. Striking through the thought of his dear ones
was a sound which he could neither ignore nor
understand, a sharp; distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke of a blacksmith's hammer upon the anvil; it had the same
ringing quality. He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably distant or nearby
— it seemed both.
Its recurrence was regular, but as slow as the tolling of a death knell. He awaited each
stroke with impatience and — he knew not why — apprehension. The intervals
of silence grew progressively longer; the delays became maddening. With
their greater infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness. They
hurt his ear like the thrust of a knife; he feared he would shriek. What he heard
was the ticking of his watch.
He
unclosed his eyes and saw again the water below him. "If I could free my hands," he thought, "I might throw off the noose and spring
into the stream. By diving I could evade the bullets, and,
swimming vigorously, reach the bank,
take to the woods, and get away home. My
home, thank God; is as yet outside
their lines; my wife and little ones are still beyond the invader's farthest advance."
As these thoughts, which have here to be set down in
words, were flashed into the doomed
man's brain rather than evolved from it, the captain nodded to the sergeant. The
sergeant stepped aside.
Peyton Farquhar was a well-to-do planter of an old and
highly respected Alabama family. Being a slave owner and like other slave
owners a politician, he was naturally an
original secessionist and ardently devoted to the Southern cause. Circumstances of an imperious nature, which
it is unnecessary to relate here, had prevented him
from taking service with the gallant army which had fought the disastrous campaigns ending with the fall of Corinth,2
and he chafed under the inglorious restraint, longing for
the release of his energies, the larger life of
the soldier, the opportunity for distinction.
That opportunity, he felt, would come, as it comes to all in war time.
Meanwhile he did what he could. No
service was too humble for him to
perform in aid of the South, no adventure too perilous for him to undertake if consistent with the character of a
civilian who was at heart a soldier,
and who in good faith and without too much qualification assented to at least a part of the frankly
villainous dictum that all is fair in love and war.
One
evening while Farquhar and his wife were sitting on a rustic bench near the entrance to his grounds, a gray-clad
soldier3
rode up to the gate and asked for a
drink of water. Mrs. Farquhar was only
too happy to serve him with her own
white hands. While she was gone to fetch
the water, her husband approached the
dusty horseman and inquired eagerly for news from the front.
"The Yanks are repairing the railroads," said
the man, "and are getting ready for another
advance. They have reached the Owl Creek
Bridge, put it in order, and built a
stockade on the north bank. The
commandant has issued an order, which is posted
everywhere, declaring that any civilian caught interfering with the railroad, its bridges, tunnels, or trains will be
summarily hanged. I saw the order"
"How far is it to the Owl Creek bridge?", Farquhar asked...
"About
thirty miles."
"Is
there no force on this side the creek?"
"Only a picket post half a mile out, on the
railroad, and a single sentinel at this end of the bridge."
"Suppose a man — a civilian and student of hanging —
should elude the picket post and perhaps
get the better of the sentinel," said Farquhar, smiling, "what could he accomplish?"
The soldier reflected.
"I was there a month ago," he replied. "I observed that the flood of last winter had lodged a great
quantity of driftwood against the wooden pier
at this end of the bridge. It is now dry
and would burn like tow."
The
lady had now brought the water, which the soldier drank. He, thanked her
ceremoniously, bowed to her husband, and rode away. An hour later, after nightfall, he re-passed the plantation, going northward
in the direction from which he had
come. He was a Federal scout.
As Peyton Farquhar fell straight downward through the
bridge he lost consciousness and was as one already
dead. From this state he was awakened — ages
later, it seemed to him — by the pain of a sharp
pressure upon his throat, followed by a sense
of suffocation. Keen, poignant agonies
seemed to shoot from his neck
downward through every fiber of his body and limbs. These pains appeared
to flash along well-defined lines of ramification and to beat with an inconceivably rapid periodicity. They seemed like streams of pulsating fire
heating him to an intolerable
temperature. As to his head, he was
conscious of nothing but a feeling of fullness — of
congestion. These sensations were
unaccompanied by thought. The intellectual part of his nature was
already effaced; he had power only to
feel, and feeling was torment. He was
conscious of motion. Encompassed in a luminous cloud, of which he was now merely
the fiery heart, without material substance, he swung through unthinkable arcs
of oscillation, like a vast pendulum. Then all at once, with terrible suddenness,
the light about him shot upward with the noise of a
loud plash; a frightful roaring was in his ears, and all was cold and dark. The power of thought was restored; he knew that the rope had broken and he had fallen into the
stream. There was no additional strangulation; the noose about his neck was
already suffocating him and kept the water
from his lungs. To die of hanging at the
bottom of a river! — the idea seemed to
him ludicrous. He opened his eyes in the
darkness and saw above him a gleam of light, but how
distant, how inaccessible! He was still
sinking, for the light became fainter
and fainter until it was a mere glimmer.
Then it began to grow and brighten, and he
knew that he was rising toward the surface — knew
it with reluctance, for he was now very comfortable. "To be hanged
and drowned," he thought, "that is not so bad; but I do not wish to be shot." No, I will not be shot, that is not
fair."
He was not conscious of an effort, but a sharp pain in
his wrist apprised him that he was
trying to free his hands. He gave the
struggle his attention, as an idler might
observe the feat of a juggler, without interest in the outcome. What splendid
effort! — what magnificent, what super-human strength! Ah, that was a fine endeavor! Bravo! The cord fell away; his arms parted and floated
upward, the hands dimly seen on each side in the growing
light. He watched them with a new interest as first one and then the other
pounced upon the noose at his neck. They tore it away and thrust it fiercely
aside, its undulations resembling those of a
water snake. "Put it back, put it
back!" He thought he shouted these words to his
hands, for the undoing of the noose had been succeeded by the direst
pang that he had yet experienced. His
neck ached horribly; his brain was on fire;
his heart, which had been fluttering faintly, gave a great leap, trying to
force itself out at his mouth. His whole
body was racked and wrenched with an
insupportable anguish! But his
disobedient hands gave no heed to the command. They beat the water vigorously with quick, downward
strokes, forcing him to the surface. He felt his head emerge; his eyes were
blinded by the sunlight; his chest expanded
convulsively, and with a supreme and crowning agony
his lungs engulfed a great draught of air, which instantly he expelled in a
shriek!
He was now in full possession of his physical senses. They were, indeed, preternaturally keen and alert. Something in the awful disturbance of his organic system had so exalted and refined them that they
made record of things never before
perceived. He felt the ripples upon his
face and heard their separate sounds as
they struck. He looked at the forest on
the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves and the veining of
each leaf — saw the very insects upon
them: the locusts, the brilliant-bodied flies, the gray spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig: He noted the prismatic
colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass. The humming of the gnats that danced above the eddies of the stream, the beating of the
dragonflies' wings, the strokes of the water
spiders' legs, like oars which had lifted their boat — all these made audible music. A
fish slid along beneath his eyes and he heard the rush of its body parting the water.
He had come to the surface facing down the stream; in a
moment the visible world seemed to wheel slowly
round, himself the pivotal point, and he saw the bridge,
the fort, the soldiers upon the bridge, the captain, the sergeant, the two privates, his executioners. They were in silhouette against the blue sky. They shouted and
gesticulated, pointing at him. The
captain had drawn his pistol, but did not fire;
the others were unarmed. Their movements
were grotesque and horrible, their forms gigantic.
Suddenly he heard a sharp report and something struck the
water smartly within a few inches of his head, spattering his face with spray. He heard the second report, and saw one of the sentinels with his rifle at his
shoulder, a light cloud of blue smoke rising
from the muzzle. The man in the water
saw the eye of the man on the bridge
gazing into his own, through the sights of the rifle. He observed that it was a gray eye and remembered having read that gray eyes
were keenest, and that all famous
marksmen had them. Nevertheless, this
one had missed.
A counterswirl had caught Farquhar and turned him half
round; he was again looking into the forest on the bank opposite the
fort. The sound of a clear, high voice in a monotonous singsong now rang out behind him and came across the water with distinctness that pierced and
subdued all other sounds, even the beating
of the ripples in his ears. Although no
soldier, he had frequented camps enough to know the
dread significance of that deliberate, drawling,
aspirated chant; the lieutenant on shore was taking part in the morning's work. How coldly and pitilessly — with what an
even, calm intonation, presaging and
enforcing tranquillity in the men — with what accurately measured intervals fell those cruel words: "Attention, company! — — Shoulder arms! —
— — Ready! —
— — Aim! —
— — Fire!"
Farquhar dived — dived as deeply as he could. The water roared in his ears like the voice of Niagara, yet he heard the dulled
thunder of the volley and, rising again
toward the surface, met shining bits of metal, singularly flattened, oscillating slowly downward. Some of them touched him on the face and
hands, then fell away, continuing their descent. One lodged between his collar and his .neck; it was uncomfortably warm and he
snatched it out.
As
he rose to the surface, gasping for breath, he saw that he had been a long time
under water; he was perceptibly farther downstream — nearer to safety. The
soldiers had almost finished reloading; the metal ramrods flashed all at once in the sunshine as they were drawn from
the barrels, turned in the air, and thrust into their sockets. The two sentinels fired again, independently and
ineffectually.
The hunted man saw all this over his shoulder; he was
now swimming vigorously with the current. His brain was as energetic as his arms and
legs; he thought with the rapidity of
lightning.
"The
officer," he reasoned, "will not make that martinet's error a second time It is as easy to dodge a volley as a single
shot. He has probably already given
the command to fire at will. God help
me, I cannot dodge them all!"
An appalling plash within two yards of him was followed
by a loud, rushing sound, diminuendo,4
which seemed to travel back through the air to the fort and died in an explosion which stirred the very river to
its deeps! Arising sheet of water, which curved over him, fell down upon him,
blinded him, strangled him! The cannon had taken a hand in the game. As he shook his head free from the commotion of the smitten water, he heard
the deflected shot humming through
the air ahead, and in an instant it was cracking and smashing the branches in the forest beyond.
"They
will not do that again," he thought; "the next time they will use a charge of grape.' I must keep my eye upon the gun;
the smoke will apprise me — the report arrives too late; it lags behind the
missile. That is a good gun."
Suddenly he felt himself whirled round and round — spinning
like a top. The water, the banks, the forests, the now distant
bridge, fort, and men — all were commingled
and blurred. Objects were represented by
their colors only; circular horizontal streaks of
color — that was all he saw. He had been
caught in a vortex and was being whirled on with a
velocity of advance and gyration which
made him giddy and sick. In a few
moments he was flung upon the gravel at the foot of the left bank of the stream
— the southern bank — and behind a projecting point
which concealed him from his enemies.
The sudden arrest of his motion, the abrasion of one of his hands on the gravel, restored him, and he wept with delight. He dug his fingers into the sand, threw it over himself in handfuls, and
audibly blessed it. It looked like
gold, like diamonds, rubies, emeralds; he could think of nothing beautiful which it did not resemble. The trees upon the bank were giant garden plants;
he noted a definite order in their arrangement, inhaled the fragrance of their blooms.
A strange, roseate light shone through the spaces among their trunks and
the wind made in their branches the music of aeolian harps.6 He
had no wish to perfect his escape — was
content to remain in that enchanting spot until retaken.
A whiz and rattle of grapeshot among the branches high
above his head roused him from his dream. The baffled cannoneer had fired him a random farewell. He
sprang to his feet, rushed up the sloping bank, and plunged into the
forest.
All that day he traveled, laying his course by the
rounding sun. The forest seemed interminable; nowhere did he discover a break
in it, not even a woodman's road. He
had not known that he lived in so wild a region. There was something uncanny in the
revelation.
By
nightfall he was fatigued, foot sore, famishing. The thought of his wife and children urged him on. At last he found a road which led him in what
he knew to be the right direction. It was wide and straight as a city street,
yet it seemed untraveled. No fields bordered it, no dwelling anywhere. Not so much as the barking of a dog suggested
human habitation. The black bodies of
the great trees formed a straight wall on both sides, terminating on the
horizon in a point, like a diagram in a
lesson in perspective. Overhead, as he
looked up through this rift in the
wood, shone great golden stars looking unfamiliar and grouped in strange
constellations. He was sure they were arranged
in some order which had a secret and malign
significance. The wood on either side
was full of singular noises, among which — once, twice, and again — he
distinctly heard whispers in an unknown
tongue.
His neck was in pain and lifting his hand to it he found
it horribly swollen. He knew that it had a circle of black where the rope had
bruised it. His eyes felt congested; he could no longer close them. His tongue was swollen with thirst; he relieved its fever by thrusting it forward from
between his teeth into the cool air. How softly the turf had carpeted the
untraveled avenue — he could no longer feel the roadway beneath his
feet!
Doubtless, despite his suffering, he had fallen asleep
while walking, for now he sees another
scene — perhaps he has
merely recovered from a delirium. He stands at the gate of his own home. All is as he left it, and all bright and beautiful in the morning sunshine. He must have traveled the entire night. As he pushes open the gate and passes up the wide white walk, he sees a
flutter of female garments; his
wife, looking fresh and cool and sweet, steps down from the veranda to meet him. At the bottom of the steps she stands
waiting, with a smile of ineffable joy, an attitude of matchless grace and
dignity. Ah, how beautiful she is! He springs forward with extended
arms. As he is about to clasp her, he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the
neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the
shock of a cannon — then all is darkness and silence!
Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck,
swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek Bridge.
1 Ties, wooden
beams to which railroad tracks are attached.
2 Corinth;
Mississippi, occupied by Union forces in May, 1880.
3 Dressed in the
gray uniform of a Confederate soldier.
4 Italian: diminishing in volume.
5
Grapeshot, a cluster of iron balls fired from a cannon.
6
Stringed instruments that sound when exposed to the wind.
