AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE
by Ambrose Bierce

THE MILLENNIUM FULCRUM EDITION, 1988

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 closely encircled his neck.  It was attached to
a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack feel to the
level of his knees.  Some loose boards laid upon the ties
supporting the rails 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 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 slope 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 up the slope between the
bridge and fort were the spectators -- a single company of
infantry in line, at "parade rest," the butts of their 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 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 moustache 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 judgement 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 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 new 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 trust 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 Fahrquhar 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 that gallant army which 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 wartime.  Meanwhile he
did what he could.  No service was too humble for him to
perform in the aid of the South, no adventure to 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 Fahrquhar 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. Fahrquhar 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?" Fahrquhar asked.

"About thirty miles."

"Is there no force on this side of 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 Fahrquhar, 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
tinder."

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 Fahrquhar 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