The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce | Page 4

the legs
thrown sharply forward as in the act of alighting from a leap. But this
was a flight!
Filled with amazement and terror by this apparition of a horseman in
the sky--half believing himself the chosen scribe of some new
Apocalypse, the officer was overcome by the intensity of his emotions;
his legs failed him and he fell. Almost at the same instant he heard a
crashing sound in the trees--a sound that died without an echo--and all
was still.
The officer rose to his feet, trembling. The familiar sensation of an
abraded shin recalled his dazed faculties. Pulling himself together he
ran rapidly obliquely away from the cliff to a point distant from its foot;
thereabout he expected to find his man; and thereabout he naturally
failed. In the fleeting instant of his vision his imagination had been so
wrought upon by the apparent grace and ease and intention of the
marvelous performance that it did not occur to him that the line of
march of aërial cavalry is directly downward, and that he could find the
objects of his search at the very foot of the cliff. A half-hour later he
returned to camp.

This officer was a wise man; he knew better than to tell an incredible
truth. He said nothing of what he had seen. But when the commander
asked him if in his scout he had learned anything of advantage to the
expedition he answered:
"Yes, sir; there is no road leading down into this valley from the
southward."
The commander, knowing better, smiled.
IV
After firing his shot, Private Carter Druse reloaded his rifle and
resumed his watch. Ten minutes had hardly passed when a Federal
sergeant crept cautiously to him on hands and knees. Druse neither
turned his head nor looked at him, but lay without motion or sign of
recognition.
"Did you fire?" the sergeant whispered.
"Yes."
"At what?"
"A horse. It was standing on yonder rock--pretty far out. You see it is
no longer there. It went over the cliff."
The man's face was white, but he showed no other sign of emotion.
Having answered, he turned away his eyes and said no more. The
sergeant did not understand.
"See here, Druse," he said, after a moment's silence, "it's no use making
a mystery. I order you to report. Was there anybody on the horse?"
"Yes."
"Well?"
"My father."
The sergeant rose to his feet and walked away. "Good God!" he said.

AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE
I
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 fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the
sleepers 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, loop-holed for rifles, with a single
embrasure through which protruded the muzzle of a brass cannon
commanding the bridge. Mid-way 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