An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
I
A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern
Alabama,3 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 closely 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 sleepers4
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 centre of the bridge; they
merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that 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 topped with a stockade of vertical tree trunks,
loopholed 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 centre 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 habit, 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 persons, 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 cross-ties 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 near by—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.
II
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 that had fought the disastrous campaigns ending with the fall
of Corinth, 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 soldier 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 fetching 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 repassed the
plantation, going northward in the direction from which he had
come. He was a Federal scout.
III
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 fibre 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 fulness—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 to ward 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 superhuman 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
dragon-flies’ 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 a 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
markmen had them. Nevertheless, this one had missed.
A counter-swirl 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 a
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 a part in the morning’s work. How coldly and pitilessly—with
what an even, calm intonation, presaging, and enforcing tranquility
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 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 down stream—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,5
which seemed to travel back through the air to the fort and died in
an explosion which stirred the very river to its deeps! A rising
sheet of water 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 that 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
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 æolian 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, footsore, 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 as 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 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
cold 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.